Bulwark Takes - Sam Stein, JVL and Mark Hertling React to Trump's Iran Address

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Sam Stein, JVL and Mark Hertling were live to reacting to President Trump's April 1st address on the war in Iran.

The Bell Air Direct app includes crash assist, which detects an accident the moment it happens, and even offers you emergency assistance at the tap of a button. Okay, but what if I don't have an accident? Well, just keep on, keeping on. Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. I, uh, okay, first of all, let me just apologize to people who are tuning in. We had some technical difficulties.

Uh, I'm not sure how to describe what you missed. If you were watching that, at first, honestly, guys, I thought, okay, there's something, there's a, there's a structure to this, there's a purpose to this. He's going to outline some path outward. And then it just honestly, and I know this is a cliche, but it was an extended truth social rant. It really was. It was a stitch together, truth social rant that basically boiled down to we are very close to meeting our core objectives and also we're about to bomb them into the stone age. Now is it. Contradictory claims with no actual strategic vision, JVIL's sort of not fully in agreement. but why?

What do you get wrong? It's not that I'm not fault. He says we're very close to our core objectives. I don't believe he outlined any core objectives. He, I mean, just as a piece of performance, was that a guy who sounded together to you guys? Because that sounded, I mean, I don't want to make light of cognitive to line. But holy shit, if you have kids in the military and that's the commander in chief,

do you think to yourself? Yeah, this guy's got his fastball. Don't worry. He has dialed in. He knows just what's going on. I mean, I just think it was sort of terrifying. Like, if my, my oldest kid is going to turn 18 next week was enlisting, I would like chain him to, to a pipe or something and say, you cannot go into the military with this guy running that, I mean, it's insane. It was sleepy. It was ad-libbed. I'm pretty sure it was ad-libbed.

I'm almost positive it was ad-libbed. At least portions of it were ad-libbed. It was incoherent of parts. It went to weird sides, like, leave it to your imagination, but they can't believe what they're seeing. What are you talking about? Again, it was contradictory. There was no actual, I'm not sure what the purpose was. It just was a summarization of everything you said.

Yeah. That's what I want to ask, Mark. what do you think, because this wasn't a impromptu thing on the tarmac or something like this. I mean, this was a plan, this was a set piece. What do you think the strategic or political or communications objective of this was? Well, I got to tell you, I was writing notes, scribbling notes like crazy. The only thing of any value I took off that was halfway coherent when he start talking about the strategic objectives, but then he named, our objectives were to eliminate the Navy, they're now destroyed, to take out their Air Force and missiles, and those are all now gone, his term, not mine. The industrial base is gone. Those were the three I heard.

then he went into what I think we should probably appropriately call the rape pillage Trump doctrine because he invited all of Europe and anybody else that wanted oil just to go in and take it because he doesn't need it. I mean, we don't need it. We've got more than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined, which is an outright lie. So the one thing is I was scribbling. I finally, I just thought to myself, who's writing this speech for him? Who is putting this thing together? Who is his speech writer? And what kind of communication process do they have to actually get some kind of coherence and precision and discipline into the things he's communicating to the entire American people? He asked for airtime for this tonight. And it's just amazing that anybody gated to him.

and he's not going to probably get it anymore unless he beats up all of the... I disagree. I am so glad that they gave it to him. I'm happy people got to see that. I think it's important people see that because it was... If you just read his truth, that's not the vast majority of the population. But this is his rambling truths. And to see it in the flesh was remarkable.

Tim Miller's join us. Tim, you were very hot on this. I wasn't supposed to be on tonight. But what in the fuck was that? like honestly what in the fuck was that i to general hurtling's point about who wrote it whoever's writing the truth social posts is who wrote it so maybe the golf caddy i guess the golf yeah i think the golf caddy probably wrote it um because because it was he writes his own posts he dictates them to an age so yeah i think it was probably him and

because it was just a rambling truth social post like the as best as i could tell like if you were coming into this clean, like if you had watched the Artemis launch and then went and cooked to dinner and then like accidentally left CBS on and came back and like he was talking. You know, and you're trying to figure out what are we doing there? Like, why is this war happening still? The best thing that I could tell that he said was was we're there to help. It's like, we're there to help. And Israel and the entire Middle East would be wiped off the map if I hadn't won. And that's why we're doing this. And we can't let them have a nuclear weapon. There was never a pitch for like why actually we care if they had a nuclear weapon. Like I understand the abstract, et cetera. But I don't know. I just as me sitting there on the couch watching this rambling old man talk about this war,

I'm like a little bit more worried about Donald Trump using the nuclear weapons that all he needs to do is press a button than the mullahs in Tehran, enriching uranium through a multi-year process and attacking us the nuclear weapon. not to say it's not a concern that Iran would have a nuclear weapon, but like, there is no pitch that like this was an urgent thing that could matter to somebody who lives in Topeka. Like that there is a, you know, so. Because otherwise, the Iranians might extort the rest of the Middle East the way they're currently extorting the Middle East. Right. I mean, the pitch was literally, we're there to save Israel.

Like, it's literally the pitch. Like, we're there to save the Middle East and our other friends, Israel and our other friends are good friends. they're giving us a free plane and buying our trip. No, good friends Saudi Arabia and Qatar. That is the fucking pitch. And like that is crazy. Like that's a crazy pitch. It's like we have to keep.

And then there's no announcement. There's no like so in service of that we are going to do this, that and the other thing. Right. Yeah. In service of that, we're going to send in troops to Ishran and like we want to go get their uranium. Like that's the point. And Iran has Iran has two weeks to make a deal or else we're going to send people in. we're going to go get the uranium and take it out so they can never do it again.

That would be an insane. I don't know, Mark Hurtling would probably know better than me. That seems like that would be an insane mission. But like that would at least be a coherent strategy that like or something. I can, I can notion that they're giving people. That's not what he offered. It was just a rambling mess where it's like, well, you never. If they get the nuclear, then maybe the Middle East would go away.

And something, something, something. We can't have it. Other presidents could have had it. Oh, by the way, do you know how long the Korean war was? I want to address that. I want to address that. Mark, Mark, one second. One second.

Let's play that video and Mark address that after. Because this one just blew my mind when he was comparing this to World War II and World War I in the Korean War as if, you know, it's just like it's a minor inconvenience that we're having here. So why don't we play that and Mark on the other side go off? The nuclear sites that we obliterated with the B-2 bombers have been hit so hard that it would take months to get near the nuclear dust, and we have it under intense satellite surveillance and control.

If we see them make a move, even a move for it, we'll hit them with missiles very hard again. We have all the cards, they have none. It's very important that we keep this conflict in perspective. American involvement in World War I lasted one year, seven months and five days. World War II lasted for three years, eight months, and 25 days. The Korean War lasted for three years, one month, and two days.

The Vietnam War lasted for 19 years, five months, and 29 days. Iraq went on for eight years, eight months, and 28 days. We are in this military operation, so powerful, so brilliant, against one of the most powerful countries for 30 years. days and the country has been eviscerated. Essentially, is really no longer a threat. All right, Mark, he clearly wrote that with the help of chat GPT, but what are your thoughts? You know, that was the part where I said to myself, who the fuck is writing his speeches?

I mean, seriously, you know, I've had the opportunity during combat operations to meet with or be with for short periods of time, a couple of senior leaders and the president of the United States. And I got to tell you, you walk away with conviction, you understand better because they communicate. You know, after listening to this, you know, if I were a four-star general today in his military, I think I'd walk out of the room saying something along the lines of, we're all going to die because he doesn't know what he's doing. I mean, he has no friggin' clue. Well, first of all, I mean, you know, you could talk about each one of the calculations in the war. Yes, the United States was in World War I for a year and however many number of days,

but that thing went on for 10 years and it was a slug fit. I mean, I don't even want to get into the military history. But again, who gave him that information? He didn't get it himself. I mean, he's not his own researcher on this stuff. So someone is feeding him this stuff. And the people who are feeding them this stuff are the same ones that are allowing the entire U.S. government to go haywire right now. And we have said it so many.

I'm sorry, go ahead. Finish, finish, Mark. No, you know, Tim, I've heard you say it so many times on different media outlets of where are the people standing up and saying enough? This man, I mean, I don't care what your ideological background. is this guy does not have common sense. He just doesn't have a sense of reality. And again, it's people around him that are a lot. I mean, when the teleprompters were set up in the wherever he was given the speech from,

and they allowed him to give this speech, it's like, that's, it's criminal intent. I'm just going to say briefly, sorry, that JV. Go, just like, even if they aren't all going to, you know, that's, you're being a little cheeky, Like, who the hell knows? Sure, maybe they do a ground incursion. They didn't announce anything, right? So, even short of, people are going to die. Like, let's say he does the opposite, right?

Which is like, hey, in two weeks, I give another speech just like this. I talk about how we won and we haven't done anything differently and whatever we've won. That is not as bad of malpractice because people won't be dead. But that is also not, like there is real damage happening all around the world, like to, but to Americans, but to the people that live in countries that are. our allies every day this goes on you know like we are you know people are going to have shortages like they're going to be gas lines in the uk and in japan like not far from now like people in this country that are struggling to make ends meet like are going to have their prices go up on everything and he can't enunciate why at all it's just like well we're just going to keep on keeping on for a

couple weeks and who knows maybe we'll degrade their missiles more it's like who care why yeah jviel i mean i i feel even asking us. But so when Trump and Biden had their first debate, we, we went to our first commercial break. And during the commercial break, we had like us on to talk. And I remember saying to people, well, okay, well, he's going to have to drop off the ticket because this is the equivalent of a health event on national television. Didn't this kind of look like a health event on national television? The Bell Air Direct app includes Crash Assist, which detects an accident the moment it happens and even offers you emergency assistance at the tap of a button. Okay, but what if I don't have an accident?

Well, just keep on keeping on. Bell Air Direct. Insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. No, I'm not, I mean, and it's one thing to ramble when it's just about look at all the things we've done or maybe we'll invade Greenland. But you're in a hot war. I mean, you do have American service members in harm's way. You've had people killed. You have like actual bombs going off.

This seemed like a health event. And is it crazy to think that no Republican in Congress is going to walk out and say, look, we all saw that, right? You guys saw that too, right? I am kind of curious. Yeah, I want to see what the reaction is on the online. Right. Because there have been people in the lead up to this, the sort of people who are waiting for an off ramp, we're getting excited about all these leaks, right? There's a bunch of leagues being like he's going to declare that this thing is over. He's going to say he's winding it down. The objectives have been achieved. And he did do that at the top. And then he didn't do that. He went from, we're here to help. The war will be over, quote, very shortly to, we will be hitting Iran very hard over the next two to three weeks. These are contradictory statements. It is, but I do think, Sam, I think that he implicitly closed the door to ground troops.

He did? Elaborate. Why do you say that? So the reason I say this is because if you give this speech and you tell the country in the first real way that you've addressed the entire war, period, hey, we're almost done. It'll just be another two to three weeks. We're really close. We've almost achieved all of our strategic objectives. and you don't prepare them for ground troops,

you don't say it's possible that we're going to put boots on the ground, and then you do it, the political fallout from that. Like a normal prism. I think that's a prism of a normal politician, though. I think, I think, I don't know, I just think his whole shit, I can do whatever I want.

I think to send in ground troops after this. Doing what he's doing is crazy. Political damage. I mean, he also, he also spent tonight saying he's, going to commit a war crime, right? He said he will not, he will bomb the power plants of Iran simultaneously, all of them simultaneously. So we're acting like, well, you know, he's an irrational person here saying irrational things. I don't think we could be like, well, he didn't say he'll

send any ground trips, therefore there's no ground troops, right? I just think he's, to Mark's not even, I think he's trying to get through the day. To not even nod to it or say, and who knows we may have to, I agree that it's crazy. I just don't know if there was any implicit message. I don't know. Here's the thing I'll add to that. I mean, you know, I've had family members while I was deployed while our sons were deployed who took, they were assuaged by members of the government coming on TV and saying, here's what's happening. Here's what's going to happen in the future.

It's a tough fight. Hama, huma. And I remember my wife saying one time that when, during Desert Storm, when people like Colin Powell or Dick Cheney, I mean, even Dick Cheney getting on the air and speaking what was happening, okay, we know our soldiers are over there for a mission. Right now, if I were not so much a soldier, it would scare the hell out of me as a soldier watching this speech. But if I were a family member of one of those 60,000 people who are deployed to the Middle East right now in ships and muse and, an army brigade, I'd be scared to death. I really would.

I want to talk about the oil stuff for a second, because I talked to Josh Barrow on the podcast for a long time about this today. And I think he was really sharp about how, like, you know, we're about to go through a period. Like we're not there yet because a lot of the petroleum was on ships and stuff. He said we're doing this for two or three weeks. And we're about during that time period, kind of towards the end of that time period, we're about to be a place where there's like actual shortages. People are going to have to cut down on their behavior to offset the shortages we have.

It will be less of a problem here than it will be in the rest of the world, but it's a global market. We've had the largest monthly increase in gas prices, I think ever this month. The chart went to hockey stick during that speech. And the speech was like, even at the end of three weeks, it wasn't like, oh, the straight is going to be open. And basically, like, if you're trying to read through his gobbledygook, you know, dentures, like, talk, like, the takeaway is like, well, actually, no, it's not. Actually, it could be, who knows how long after that, before the straight opens. The rest of the world is going to have to deal with it.

Okay, I have one more thing after that. Let's play the clip. Play the clip because it's very clear he has no plan for the straight itself. And he, I will just, just say, he also said, in this kind of went unnoticed. He said, we could bomb their oil, but we're not going to because we want them to rebuild. but we could bomb their oil. So let's do take the oil clip and then, Kim, finish your thought on the end of that. The countries of the world that do receive oil through the hormones rate must take care of that passage.

They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it. They can do it easily. We will be helpful. Counties a rapist. They should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on. So to those countries that can't get fuel, many of which refuse to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, we had to do it ourselves. I have a suggestion.

Number one, buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty. We have so much. And number two, build up some delayed courage. Should have done it before. Should have done it with us, as we asked. Go to the straight and just take it, protect it. use it for yourselves. Iran has been essentially decimated.

I'll defer to refer to you guys on the geopolitics of this, of taking the straight by the pussy or whatever his plan was for the UK. But on the just economics part of it, could he's talking with the economics? We're going to be in a period of shortages. And he's like, okay, so the strait's going to, you guys aren't to figure that out. It's going to take a while for that to figure out. I'm just doing basic Adam Smith here. We don't want the world buying our oil, actually. We should probably put the export ban back on. like if we get into this situation. Like we should be hoarding our.

Honestly, if you don't care about America first. Even more, wouldn't it, Tim? I mean, if the demand, yes,

if the demand, because foreign countries want to buy our oil instead of having us sell it domestically, supply demand, right? Supply constant.

Demand goes up. Price goes up. Yeah. Because I want to show you something. Sorry, his plan would drive it up even more. No, yes,

that's what you guys are in agreement. Sorry, we're saying the same thing. I thought you're saying what I was suggesting would. Yeah. No, it's absolutely. I mean, it's crazy.

Guys, check out this, check out the Oil Futures graphic we want to put up. Tell me if you can see the time where Trump started speaking. Yeah. Man. Real direction chart. Yeah, Alice chart. Yeah. And then it's, again, and then it's like, okay, we're going to sell the people with oil.

No, wrong. He has no concept for how fucked the economic situation is. He's like walking around. What this reminds me of is I went skiing like the weekend before Tom Hanks got COVID. And we were on the mountain. We were going down the blues. And it's like, whatever, you know, we hear that there's this thing out there. There'll be a little disruption.

And the next thing, you know, like that, it feels like he's skiing right now, like during, like right before. We're about to have a very serious economic crisis. And it's like, I've got no plan at all. Can I raise something for the group? Sure. So one of the thing, you know, one of my little obsessions is about like the decline of the American-led world order and all of the advantages that that once afforded us. Trump's plan is that other nations presumably led by China ought to form their

own alliance and association to exert control over the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah. Right. Right. He's willing into existence a global strategic competitor for America. Yeah. That's the craziest shit I've ever heard. Yeah.

We have a super user question actually on this that I want to get. I'm going to pose this one to Mark, actually. It's from Joe L.T. 49. He says, if the Strait of Hamos was so easy to open to defend as Trump claimed it was, then why hasn't our own military already done it? Because it's not. Because it's not. I mean, we've talked about this.

I've written about it, several articles in the bulwark. It's hard. You know, this whole combat thing, it ain't easy. And, you know, especially when you're, you're miffin it, as this current administration is, with no planning, as you said earlier, JVL. It's not just long-term planning, it's short-term planning. It's any planning at all. You have the cause and effect when you're trying to use military force as the principal element of national power

before you've done anything else. And when you don't put the military force into action with a required end state, we don't know what we're doing other than bombing things. Something has gotten into his head thinking that we can get into and out of it. of wars using air power alone with some special operators every once in a while to snatch and grab people or to create regime change. That's not how it works. And it gets back to just a simple understanding. If you're going to wear the title of Commander and Chief, you sort of need a little bit of information about what the military does and how they do it. And you don't put two

Marine muse of 2,500 Marines apiece and an airborne brigade in an area that an area the size three times of Iraq and expect to overcome the country and to do great things and take over a straight that's a major choke point in the world. It takes a lot of people to do that and it's really, really hard when you've got an enemy that gets a vote. The Bel Air Direct app includes crash assist, which detects an accident the moment it happens and even offers you emergency assistance at the tap of a button. Okay, but what if I don't have an accident? Well, just keep on, keeping on. Bel Air Direct, insurance, simplified, conditions apply. Can I bring up a question about...

Jail Trump elect Mart Hurtling was a comment I saw across the screen there. I don't hate that. I hate it a lot. I want to bring up something. I'm going to go to JV on this one first. There was no, there was a newsworthy bit of a mission in this speech. Okay? For the past...

Quite a few of those, actually. 24, well, the most news, I think. Last 24 hours we've been told that Trump is going to use this speech to talk about NATO and how angry he is at NATO and how he wants to get the U.S. out of NATO. Unless I missed it, he did not mention NATO. He did talk in the abstract about allies, need to take the oil, but he didn't mention NATO. Now, earlier in the day, he was at some prayer event for Easter, and he said this. So this is just the preface for you guys.

This was posted by the White House accidentally and ripped it off. the website. But let's play that comment he made about NATO earlier in the day. And then I'm curious to JVL for JVL. Why did he not mention it tonight? First, the speech. And so I learned about NATO. NATO won't be there if we ever have the big one. You know what I mean by the big one? We ever have the big one. Hopefully we won't. Relationships very good with the big one, better than with NATO. But they won't be there. And we spent billions, you know, we didn't have to go into Ukraine. Ukraine's thousands of miles away across the ocean. We didn't go into Ukraine, you fucking idiot.

Stupid individual. Is the big one China? Or Russia? Who's he talking about? Not totally sure what the big one is. Anyways, that's the preface for the speech. We all expected him. You, me, and Mark, were talking about this.

We thought he was going to go off on NATO. Yeah. Why? Forgot? I'm sorry. A commenter said Brian is the big one. I'm sorry. You know, it was the thing I thought he was going to go after it for a couple of reasons

and go after NATO. All the reasons he would have presented would have been wrong. And it just amazed me that all he said basically was they didn't help us out. And he used the they versus NATO didn't help us out, which surprised me. But, you know, truthfully, it doesn't matter because I'm not sure NATO wants. us anymore if we continue. You know, it's interesting. I had a conversation with someone in Europe the other day and they said, you know, for the first term of his administration and for part of the first year, we were feeling sorry for you guys and, you know, because you had this guy leading

you. But now you're all with them. You know, nothing's changing and he's still doing crazy stuff. So we don't blame him alone anymore. We're blaming all of you, which I found to be an interesting dynamic from someone in the Nordic region that has a lot of influence. My serious answer your question, Sam, is that I think that the previous clip answered your question. Like, I think that they feel like they covered the FU NATO bit with the good luck opening the straight. You know, I think that it was more about kind of that, you know, because he makes that sly. He thinks it's sly, I guess, comment about like, you guys could show some courage. You haven't showed courage yet, but better late than never.

And I think that was kind of the deal. Also, maybe he didn't realize that Mark Ruda was coming to town next week, and Mark Ruda's been buttering him up a little bit. They're golfing buddies. I don't know. Mark Ruda might have it being an Arnold Palmer type situation with him. I'm not sure. Can I ask a real question?

A little dangerous. Please. Well, my question is not real? No, no, a dangerous question. Sure. what exactly does America get from being Israel's partner in this war? No, this is not an dangerous question. So here's, I mean, I just want to say, like, if everything is transactional, like, if everything is transactional, like, if everything is transactional, and we are allied with El Salvador because we give them money and they take our prisoners, right?

And we are alive with Delci Rodriguez because even though she's a socialist autocrat, she does what we tell her to do. I mean, Israel gives us nothing. Israel takes a great deal of aid. And Iran could open the street. Our weapons. They buy our weapons. They buy our weapons with the aid.

But sure, yeah, no, I'm with you. Do you know, like, I don't. Again, from his transit. Now, I could make the, like, like, well, Israel's a democracy. Like, you know, I could give you the old Republican neocon reasons why. But from his point of view, why is he extending himself for Israel? He says it is too.

Like, this is the other thing. Like, in the speech, he says, like, we are here to help. Israel and the Middle East would be off the map if we didn't do this. So, like, he's saying that we're doing this as part of the deal. And you would lump in UAE and Qatar and Saudi with Israel. think, as countries he's talking about and talking to the leaders of. But like those other countries are buying him off. Maybe Israel's also buying him off.

I don't know. The Gaza, the Board of Peace, he wants to control Gaza. He wants to be the king of the world. They're going to put, Jared's going to put some condos there. I don't know. I guess that's the answer. But like, but he is explicitly, it is such a attack on America first, right? which is why you see the backlash within America first.

But the speech is essentially like we're doing this to help them. And I don't, I'm with you. I don't know. You know, again, you could say the democracy thing. You could say other things that people would say is that it's important to have an ally in the region. But yeah, right. Because of the radical Islam and maybe it'll come for us.

Israel is the first line of defense. Like, there's a lot of other things you could say. For a guy who's purely transactional, that's what I'm trying to get my head around. Like, I can tell you why America would be allied with Israel, right? This is not my expertise here. But I do think, and I'm curious if we could find someone smart to talk about this, if you look back at the first term, the thing that they really were most proud of on a foreign policy level was the Abraham's accord. And they talked a lot about reorienting the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East around a set of agreements between certain countries and Israel and creating a sort of nexus stability.

And Iran was obviously not part of that agreement. And they were very close to getting Saudi Arabia to be part of the agreement. I'm not sure where that stands right now. But putting that alongside with the weaponry that Israel buys, the intelligence sharing that we have with these rallies, the historical alignment as a democracy in the Middle East. And obviously, there's a close personal relationship that I believe Jared Kushner has with Bibi and all that stuff.

you get a kind of larger idea that you can pivot the Middle East politics around a series of these agreements. Now, that being said, it's clear that the Israeli, and I talked to Sue Gordon about this. I'll buy that. That's a pretty compelling explanation. Can I add one element to that? Sure. Let me just finish on Sue Gordon quickly, and then I'll say it. Sue Gordon, who was the principal deputy D&I for Trump's first term, and she left when Dan Coates was fire, but she was involved in all that stuff. I mean, she was pretty open about it.

Israel's objectives here are very much different than ours. And they are forcing our hand in ways that she doesn't, and I don't think Trump quite appreciates. And Mark, you talked a lot about who's advising him and who's giving him strategic advice and why aren't serious people in the room. And I guess the only sort of caveat to that is there might actually be quite serious people advising him just not in the Oval. Right. All right. Yeah, just two thoughts of that. One, it's so obvious what's the Uyghur is saying. This is, you don't, you can be a, the most low IQ person in the country who knows nothing about

geopolitics, who's just watching this. And it's like, obviously this war is way more in Israel's interests. It just is. Israel would say it, America would say it, like, it's in their acute security interest, right? And so then this is how conspiracies begin to blossom. Because people are like, so then why are we doing it? You know what I mean? Like, why is somebody who said he was America refers doing it and he can't enunciate it. And so to me, I think that just as an aside, like if you're concerned about anti-Semitism, you should be concerned about this. Donald Trump cannot enunciate why he's doing something where obviously the mission is so

misaligned from Israel. The other, just to answer JVL's question really quickly. What is Donald Tom getting about this? Sam sparked a thought, I think, which is really the answer. He's getting puffed up. Like, B, it's like, you're so great. Are there other folks in that world? Like, you're so great.

You're going to be the one. You're going to bring peace to the Middle East. this is your legacy. It's related to the Accords and safety forever and they're going to build a Donald Trump statue in Tel Aviv. To me, like, that's something that I can like wrap my head around from like thinking about it from the Trump perspective. I think that's right. Hey, Ken, I'd one of those lines. Well, just quickly. John, another commenter and I'm trying to get some of these viewer comments in here because I want to make sure they feel hard. But this does kind of get to what you were saying two seconds ago. I'm going to throw it to you, Tim. Jonathan says, if Trump had resisted doing an Oval Office address to this point or other similar trappings of war to avoid the optics, what change now to get him to do a traditional

speech that still had very little content? Like, why do this now? I'm sorry, Jonathan. I have no idea. I mean, I came on and said, what the fuck was that? I really, I truly, I truly have no idea. He announced nothing. Maybe he was thinking that there was like, the Artemis was happening today and this was

to be a big, I'm trying to get, you get inside Trump's brain. I don't know, like, this is a big moment for America and the rocket ship was going to go up and I was going to do rah-rah. Maybe his team kept telling him he had to and finally he said, okay, you know, a lot of times people think about this stuff as strategy when really it's just human, whatever, frailty and inertia and stuff, or it's just like, finally he had to answer. I'm open to a better theory. Somebody has one, but he didn't say anything. I wasn't supposed to be on tonight. People want to hear Mark Hurtling anyway.

So we're going to let Mark out. No, no, no. It's interesting because I think the conversation about Israel is important because, I mean, this is a blinding flash to be obvious, but Israel lives in a bad neighborhood. So does Iran. I think it's fascinating that we're hearing reports about how other Arab nations were pushing Trump to continue, especially nations that contributed a lot of money to his son-in-law. They want him to finish this because they don't, they don't, it means they don't have to.

You know, Israel has the concept of mowing the grass whenever the terrorists in Gaza or southern Lebanon or the proxies or Iran starts getting a little froggy. Every other Arab nation in the region doesn't care all that much for the malign instincts of Iran. as they put their foot against Saudi Arabia, against UAE, against Iraq, against every other country in the region. So what you've got is competing bookends in this region. And unfortunately, it seems like the president and his family is connected to both sides of those. Well, Mark, let me ask you a follow-up question because you raised an interesting prospect.

Let's say these Arab governments could snap their fingers and go back to the day before before the war. Nothing had happened. They'd all take it, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Would Israel? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, it, they see this initially as a good thing because Trump was acting. I don't think most of the Arab governments realized as well as some members of other administration what the fallout was going to be. It was predictable. This thing has been war-gameed and red teamed for the last three decades within the Department of Defense. It's obvious what was going to happen. The straits were going to be closed. The proxies were going to be used. There's all kinds of hidden weaponry inside of Iran, just like there was inside of Iraq that, I mean, every time you felt you

had fixed and finished all the Iraqi arms caches, there were 20 more on the horizon. They do their policy through weaponry. And that's a fact. So you're not going to destroy all the weapons, no matter what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Pete Heggseth tell the country. You're just not going to do it. And diplomacy, in my view, being a soldier, is probably a first resort, not a last resort. We keep relying on the military to fix and bomb everything. And we're going to continue to have these kind of quagmires if you continue to do that. JV.L. What do you think about that? I don't, I mean, I don't know if the other Arab states,

Mark would know this better than I do. I don't know that the Israelis would do a take back here, though. And I'm just, the reason I say it is only because I've read some reporting in, I want to say it was financial times and Heretz, but it could have been someplace else where they're like... What do you mean by a takeback, though? Not doing more. I mean, knowing we're going to know now. I don't think that's the case at all. Oh, okay.

Then I just misunderstood the question then. I'm sorry for that. Yeah, if they could bottle it back up, if they could say this never happened. We'll go back to early February, not, you know, no bomb had ever been dropped and we'll just go back to. that status quo? Israel would definitely, I don't think Israel would do that at all. I mean, they've been pining for this for years. Would Saudi Arabia take it back?

Possibly. I mean, they've seen what the hoodies do to them on their southern border. They don't want any part of this. So they want these people destroyed, but they don't want the kind of after effects that we're seeing right now. You know, we're sort of all beating around the larger question, I guess, and Trump is feeding into the. because he didn't give us any specifics tonight.

But the real sort of big question is, what is the off-ram? Like, how do we get out of this, right? And so Max Brooks, 8657, not who knows if it's one of the more famous Max Brooks is, but whatever. Not the zombie war X, Max, bro. No, I don't think so. Is there any action, this is for Mark, is there any actual off-ramp for Trump to take? How do we actually see this ending from a realistic perspective or a realist's perspective? Two weeks ago, I had this fear, Tim, that I'm sorry, Sam, that there was not going to be a potential good off-ramp, that the best, and in fact, I said it one time on some channel that the best we could gain out of this was a draw.

That's the best. And the only off-ramp I could see, and I thought the president was going to do it tonight, was to say, it's over. We've done what we wanted to do, and now we're pulling out. And it would have been disastrous, but it would have been the best thing for the country. He didn't do that. He didn't do that. Now, the courses of actions are still up in the air. We don't know what he's going to do next because he still has a lot of military forces in the region.

There's been no conclusion to what's going on. Iran is still doing things that he's saying they're not doing. And I don't see an off-ramp right now without a global. at least global dysfunction in terms of supply chain and the oil economy. And I hope I'm wrong. I'm not an economist. I'm a simple soldier, but that's the way I see it going down. I mean, I would just say this, and we should probably be wrapping up soon.

But it does appear to me that Iran will exit this war in a stronger strategic position than it entered. They will have lost a bunch of material. They will have lost a bunch of infrastructure. But they navigated a succession crisis, which was going to hit them anyway in a couple of years, which is always dangerous for an authoritarian regime. They proved the viability of a strategic weapon that they had long threatened but never used before, which was the ability to close the trade foremost. They did it, which means that that has to be taken to account forever, right? It's no longer a theoretical, well, maybe they could. It's now everybody knows that if there's a war, they can do this.

They will likely be resupplied by the Chinese with material very quickly, following the end of the war. And they now have the ability to project power in the region in ways they didn't before the bomb started from Operation Epic Fury. And I just To all the people who are like Ride or Die with Trump purely because they hate the Iranian regime,

which by the way, I hate the Iranian regime too, they're very bad. They're terrible, terrible people. They will be more strategically sound and more able to project power as they exit this because of this war. And I just think that that's undeniable. Can I add something to that, JVL, because I think something's important that I learned.

One of the many things I learned spending a lot of time in the Middle East is we in the West are concerned with personalities. Who is our leader? What are they doing to organizations? How does the dynamic of that personality work to build something strong? In the Middle East, to include Persia, we're talking more about a dependence on institutions as opposed to personalities. And all of the institutions in Iran, even though they've been damaged, they are still intact. The theocracy is intact. The IRGC is still intact, although dramatically damaged. Their weapon systems in many cases have been destroyed. The people are still looking for a leader. So there is still that essence of systems versus personalities working in that country.

And I think that lends credence to what you were just saying in terms of them regaining their solid footing, rebuilding a little bit if they can get the economy running again. And they're going to come out of this stronger than we went into it. We're going to close in about a couple of minutes here. And thank you guys for doing this. And again, apologies to everyone for the earlier technical snaps. I want to play a clip again from Trump earlier in the day talking about how he was going to tell the world that he was doing a great job tonight. And then we're going to look at what actually transpired. So first the clip.

Get a little speech at 9 o'clock. And basically I'm going to tell everybody how great I am. What a great job after. What a phenomenal job. What a phenomenal job I've done. All right. Well, as of 10.05, so about, you know, 43 minutes or so since he's finished speaking, a few things to just go through.

Crude oil is up. Brent is up. Dow is down. Features. S&P is down. NASDAQ is down. We have some graphs about this if we can pull them up. I mean,

that is just brutal. Brutal. That's a 500, apparently this is a $550 billion in market cap in 25 minutes as he addressed the nation. He gave no, just to summarize, He gave no reason for being in Iran, and he gave little explanation for how we are going to get out of Iran. And people are just sort of wondering where we go from here.

And we've tried to game plan it out on this conversation. I think we've come to some conclusion that we are just stuck in a really bad spot. And we'll see what happens over the next two or three weeks. Mark JVL, thank you guys for doing this. For everyone else who watched, thank you for doing this as well. Oh, nice. Sue Gordon texts me to say she's watching. Sue, come on anytime.

For everyone else, thank you for coming on. Subscribe to The Bullwork. We love you guys. We love our fans. Sorry, we couldn't get some more of your questions in the conversation, but we'll try to do better. Fellas, take care. Good luck, America. Thanks, guys.

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