Clip: The Iran war's unexpected critics

VIVIAN SALAMA: This week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was on The Hill testifying before Senate Appropriations. Watch this exchange with Republican Senator from Louisiana John Kennedy.

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R-LA): This is serious as four heart attacks and a stroke.

GEN. JOHN CAINE, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff: -- paramilitary options to do that.

JOHN KENNEDY: Were they told straight?

JOHN CAINE: Sir, that's a hypothetical question, and I don't know the answer to that.

JOHN KENNEDY: We need some hard answers and some straight talk.

Would they try to commence development again of a nuclear warhead?

PETE HEGSETH, Defense Secretary: Part of the reason President Trump had to have the courage to do what he did after Midnight Hammer is that they didn't give up their ambitions even though their nuclear sites had been obliterated. So, this is a regime hellbent on nuclear ambitions, and --

JOHN KENNEDY: Guys, we need straight answers.

PETE HEGSETH: -- President Trump is willing to go after them.

JAMES KENNEDY: We need straight answers.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Leigh Ann, talk us through some of the Republican frustration.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL, Chief Washington Correspondent, Puck: Yes. Well, first the fact that frustration is coming from Senator John Kennedy, not someone who is usually highly critical of this administration, is very notable. He is quite frustrated, and he is expressing the frustration that many of his colleagues are, and that is a lack of answers from this administration on what the objective is, what the timeline is, what the ramifications are, and what the endgame actually is.

And those are things that they haven't been able to get from this administration. Even when it comes to the funding request, there's still lots of questions about what the money is going to be used for, how much specifically is needed, how much will be needed in the future. And so when members of Congress are asked to fund billions and billions of dollars when their constituents are the ones who are being put on the line for this, patience obviously wears quite thin.

But I will say it is not manifesting in a rebuke to the president. The House did rebuke the president this week in a war powers resolution. They had the help of enough Republicans. But the Senate rejected it, and most of the Senate, senators who have been really skeptical and nervous about this war, are saying, look, the clock, the 60-day clock just restarted after the ceasefire broke. We're going to give the administration some more time.

So, there is a real dichotomy of what's happening on the Hill, but that tension is absolutely there.

VIVIAN SALAMA: And with all of these challenges, I mean, Adam just outlined many of them, midterms are now looming. And how are these lawmakers going to go onto the campaign trail and message this, especially Republicans? What's the messaging strategy?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Yes. So, the House has now left town for over a month. They left town. They voted to -- on an outline to give about $70 billion for the war. It's mostly they say their justification is this is for the troops, this is to replenish munitions. But they are going to face constituents as polling has continued to show that this war is increasingly unpopular, including among Republicans, especially as prices are not going down, especially as this war has restarted again.

And so Republicans especially have a really difficult task at hand. They are trying to justify the spending of the war, like I said, again, that it is for the troops, that it is necessary to keep our military strong. But their constituents care about costs right now. And I ask Republicans, what are you hearing from people at home? And they admit that is exactly what people are talking about.

JONATHAN KARL: I mean, the messaging from the White House, from the president is, we can never let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's why we have to do this. But that has clearly not broken through to American voters.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Right.

JONATHAN KARL: I mean, we saw a poll, so I think it was 29 percent support for this war, which translates into a significant portion of the Republican base not sold on that argument.

How do you sell the American people on that argument when you have said that their nuclear program is obliterated?

VIVIAN SALAMA: You took the words out of my mouth. They've gone back and forth on this issue.

JONATHAN KARL: And when Hegseth's answer is, well, we found out they didn't give up their nuclear ambitions, well, lots of, you know, groups have ambitions to do lots of things, so they don't have the capability to do so. How does that justify a war and then a renewed war?

I think the biggest --

DAVID SANGER: There are two built-in assumptions here. I think Jon struck on that the president's making. One is that if you don't support the war, you support Iran getting a nuclear weapon. Well, there are lots of ways to deter countries from getting nuclear weapons. We stopped South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, the list is long, without going to war.

But I think the second piece of this that is remarkable is the president himself acknowledges that the June bombing last year so buried most of their nuclear fuel that he said, I'm not that worried about it. Well, if he's not that worried about it, then why does he believe that if we give up what we're doing now for a while and monitor this, that they're necessarily going to get a nuclear weapon?

VIVIAN SALAMA: What's the answer?

DAVID SANGER: The answer is they actually -- the Iranians have not been able to get at that fuel since the bombing in June of 2025.

Now, do you need to watch it like a hawk? Absolutely. But with no fuel, you can't make the weapon.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Right.

JONATHAN KARL: But the renewed military operations here actually aren't about the nuclear issue. They're about opening up the Strait of Hormuz.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Right.

DAVID SANGER: Which was open before the war started.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Which was open before the war started.

I mean, Adam, all of these issues said, all of this said, the frustration isn't just from voters, it's not just from Republican lawmakers. You're even seeing it from certain media commentators that are essentially, you know, allied with the president or are conservative. We played some of that, the sound earlier.

Talk to us a little bit about the dynamics there and how much of it influences the president's decisions when he hears Fox News now coming out and criticizing some of these decisions.

ADAM HARRIS: Well, you know, one of the features of the last -- of both administrations is that the president watches a lot of T.V., that he watches what people are saying about him.

And, you know, I think a lot of this comes out of the fact that the president sort of preached this isolationist America First message. And when two-thirds of Republican voters are saying, well, we blame -- or two-thirds of voters are saying that, well, we blame the Republican Party for this kind of increase in gas prices, for the increase of our daily household things, I think that that is filtering into the commentariat.

It's filtering into the people who are saying, well, we're going over here. We're spending all of this money. Troops are dying for what? For our -- for us to -- we have people who are homeless. We have all of these issues that we need to solve here and -- on American soil that we're giving resources and sending resources towards something that, as you both have mentioned, right, it doesn't have a necessarily defined objective at the moment, and where the president continues to try to create this narrative that he has sort of a control over the situation where, you know, events show that there's not necessarily that control over it.

VIVIAN SALAMA: So, David, what now? I mean, does the President double down, or does he cut and run? I mean, what are the options? What are the best options?

DAVID SANGER: So, there are moments where you have seen President Trump cut and run. He negotiated with North Korea in his first term, didn't go anywhere.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Didn't go anywhere.

DAVID SANGER: The North Koreans now have 60 plus nuclear weapons. He hasn't mentioned it, right, barely mentioned it in recent times.

But he's past the moment where he can leave this because with the energy prices going up, with the straits closed, now with a second front opening up around the Red Sea, he's in a position where if he just pulled out now, the world economy and the world energy supplies would be in a far worse place than they were when he started. And so that makes it hard to sort of declare victory.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Yes.

DAVID SANGER: I could imagine --

JONATHAN KARL: I mean, he's tried. I mean, he really tried to disengage.

DAVID SANGER: Yes.

JONATHAN KARL: He really tried to get at this. He dispatched his vice president to have the highest level negotiations that we've have had with the Iranians since the revolution. And he offered terms, agreed to terms that were, you know, incredibly generous to the Iranians. He wanted to declare victory and leave. The problem was the Iranians didn't go along with it.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Right. Leigh Ann, we talked so much about President Trump's fixation this term on his legacy and, you know, how people are going to talk about him in the future. Do you get the sense that he's concerned about how the Iran war will impact his legacy, or is it more of a case, and, you know, especially from folks you talk to on the Hill, do they feel like he thinks that everyone else is wrong and he was right about this?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: So, I think legacy is absolutely number one on his mind. And the people who cover the White House might have more insight on this than me, but my understanding is actually when it comes to his legacy, he thinks that the Iran war is part of his legacy and that he has -- it has to turn out well.

What is not part of his legacy is who wins, which party takes control of the mid -- after the midterms, and he is not focused on that. And that is what is expressly frustrating for members of Congress and people whose names are on the ballot, where the president is completely captivated by these international conquests, essentially, when people at home, that's not what their priority is.

I was talking to a person who is very close to the administration this morning about the politics of it, and I said, what do you worry about heading into November? And they said, well, the war. I try not to worry about it because that's completely out of my control. But if this is not wrapped up very soon, this is going to be very difficult for Republicans.

And so I think when it comes to the president's legacy, you see it all across town with the building, with what he is doing internationally. And, politically, he thinks he's already won that legacy.

VIVIAN SALAMA: So interesting. There was another major headline that came out of the Middle East this week where the administration signed a landmark deal to develop a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia using predominantly American technology.

But hours after it was signed, President Trump took to Truth Social and essentially backtracked on it, saying that it was all contingent upon Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords and normalizing ties with Israel.

And so, David, you know, this deal has actually been met with a lot of criticism, including from conservatives. So, explain exactly what's happening here.

DAVID SANGER: So, this negotiation has been going on since the first Trump administration. It proceeded through the Biden administration. And in some ways, it's a very standard thing. It's bringing American technology to build nuclear power plants for electricity production. The Saudis, like the UAE and others who have nuclear power plants, the Saudis would like to have data centers. They want to modernize their economy. So, it all makes perfect sense.

But the Saudis did not want to sign on to some of the nonproliferation agreements that the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, did in 2009 with president -- first negotiated by President Bush, then negotiated by President Obama.

And so when the president finally got this deal together, it was announced by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and it was signed by his equivalent in Saudi Arabia. And the next morning, the president blows the whole thing up by saying, well, of course, this is not going to go forward if the Saudis don't recognize Israel, which had been the Biden plan.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Right. And, Adam, he's basically negotiating it in public after it's signed.

ADAM HARRIS: Yes.

VIVIAN SALAMA: How does that work?

HARRIS: Yes. I mean, it feels like a sort of M.O. for the president, right? It's a negotiation through posting. And I think early on in that first administration, right, I actually wrote a sort of history of the president's use of Twitter at the time, and now X. And it's functionally been how he has operated. It's how he communicates with people.

And so when he sees that, oh, there's a little bit of pushback, it's his way of communicating, well, there's actually -- there's another tweak, right? it's contingent upon something that, that we want. It doesn't look as if Saudi Arabia got everything that it wants, and, you know, the United States didn't get what it wants, and Israel, sort of its partner, didn't get what it wanted as well.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Right. And before we wrap up, this week was the last week before the Hill, you mentioned, Leigh Ann, goes on a vacation, and then, ultimately, they're going to have midterms to contend with. They call it kitchen sink week because they try to throw in everything in the kitchen sink. How did that go, Leigh Ann, first of all? And, secondly, just talk to us about the dynamic of politics on Capitol Hill going into these crucial months before the midterms.

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL: Yes. So, the House actually had a very successful week. Speaker Mike Johnson got everything that he wanted to get done, including a very limited stock trading ban, you know, a short-term funding bill that funds until after the midterm elections, this reconciliation party line framework that funds the war and some ag programs, et cetera. So, he had a really successful week after weeks and weeks of nothing moving on the House floor. So, it was good for him.

But that doesn't mean these things become law. They're -- these things have to pass the Senate. There's a lot of pushback in the Senate. The dynamics are extremely difficult and much more complicated in the Senate. You have a growing number of Senate Republicans who are extremely worried about their own reelections or mad at the president and not willing to fall in line.

And so there's a lot of unease about the midterms and all these political dynamics, a lot of frustration with the president. And members are heading home and having to deal with the anger of constituents, too. So, it's a tricky time for Republicans, despite these like minimal wins that they got this week.

VIVIAN SALAMA: And, Jon, President Trump has his own frustrations. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said this week that he was frustrated with Majority Leader John Thune. Can you explain what's happening there?

JONATHAN KARL: Yes. The president went after Thune in his speech in Georgia, I mean, pretty directly. Look, the president has been pushing for a long time. This goes back to his first term and frustration he expressed with Mitch McConnell. He wants the filibuster done with so a Republican majority, even a really narrow Republican majority can push anything it wants through the Senate. And he's insisting that Thune do this.

And Thune has tried to explain privately and publicly that there aren't the votes to change the Senate rules. You need a majority of the Republicans to do that.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Right.

JONATHAN KARL: And there is nowhere near that level of support.

So, I think this is a very interesting dynamic to watch forward because the president's frustration with Thune and his demand, a demand that Thune sees as absolutely unfair and untenable, continues. And I think you're going to see that clash more and more. Meanwhile, you know, Thune's trying to get Republican senators reelected, you know, in races that are going to be tough.

VIVIAN SALAMA: Right. And, Adam, in the minute we have left, you know, the president obviously standoffish on elections, but very much involved in trying to kind of hold -- push the House and the Senate on legislation. You know, how do you see you get the split-screen dynamic between what he's doing on their politics and what he's doing on legislation?

ADAM HARRIS: You know, if you follow from, you know, things like endorsing against John Cornyn down in Texas, things that would upset the Senate majority, but then also things like going out to Michigan, now he's planning to go to Michigan next week to campaign for Mike Rogers. And so like it's just thinking -- I think that the president believes that if he is successful on Iran, if he can sort of project success on Iran and say, you know, things like the war will be over very soon, then things will turn in his favor, that the party will come around to sort of his policy goals as long as he sort of continues that.