Bulwark Takes - Trump Claimed Iran Had No Air Defenses. Then They Shot Down US Jets.

Episode Date: April 4, 2026

Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell give their takes on the Trump White House calling an early “lid” during an escalating war with Iran. As Trump claims the U.S. military is “unstoppable,"  American fighter jets were shot down and a service member is missing. Sarah also explains that swing voters are turning against Trump, feeling misled as the war drags on and prices rise. They also discuss Trump’s repeated “48-hour” threats, rising oil costs, and the growing gap between his rhetoric and reality.

Hey, everybody, Tim Miller for the Bullwork here with my buddy, publisher of the Bullworks, are along well. It is Saturday morning here, and you'll be surprised to learn that the White House is called the lid on the day already. No more news coming out of the White House as of 11 o'clock on Saturday morning. The lid is, you aren't familiar with that phrase. That means they won't have any other press announcements. The press secretary won't talk. Donald Trump won't do anything else the rest of the day. We won't hear anything from the White House. This is kind of an early lid, given the fact that we're in war with Iran. So we have some news on that front I want to talk about. But Sarah, how do you think things are going there in the White House? Well, we just dropped the new focus group episode this week. And I don't know if you've checked it out yet. But we did swing voters about Iran. But we specifically, you know, we ask every single focus group the same opening question.

How do you think things are going in the country? Let me tell you, there's been a real turn in the voters between 2025 and today. Because the voters right now are like, things are bad. They basically couldn't be worse. I feel like I've been lied to. You know, with very few exceptions, the war in Iran is not popular with these Biden to Trump voters. And so I think that the reason that Trump called a lid is that this is not an issue. They'd like to talk about American planes being shot down.

Trump's panned speech. In fact, they're probably thrilled that we've spent any time on Hassan Piker because the genuine point is we should really all just be focused on this war, how badly it's going and how much it's turning public opinion against Trump. It's a nightmare. Well, I kind of forget, as you know, as I said, I took a little break from the focus groups in 2025 because I was tired of the people. But, you know, I'm locking back in now. I didn't listen to it as soon as it dropped. But I will be getting to it this weekend. But remind, like, what were the Biden and Trump voters saying about the state of things last year? Like, what were the, well, how would they talk about? I guess things weren't going really that great

last year, and obviously they're substantially worse now. And I'm just kind of curious, like, were they hedging? Were they optimistic? No, they were hedging. So there was just a lot of Rome wasn't built in a day. You've got to give him time. Like, they hear Trump saying, I'm going to solve these things in a day. And nobody really believes that. Like, that's sort of the build the wall. What it means is I will focus on these things that matter to you. I will take them seriously. And so people were in 2025 kind of saying, like, well, maybe the tariffs are going to work out, although people were pretty mixed on that in terms of Trump voters. But especially for swing voters, they knew things were going poorly last year,

but they didn't necessarily think that was the permanent condition. Whereas now with the war in Iran, job numbers being bad, the economy overall being bad. Like people just aren't optimistic and they feel like things are getting worse, more expensive. And they feel like Trump isn't concentrating on the things that they wanted him to concentrate on. This is just the basic thing. They're like, dude, we hired you because you were supposed to be a business. guy who was going to lower our prices, that's not happening. In fact, things are getting more expensive. You mentioned the downed F-15 and the update as we're taping this, as I said, late morning on

Saturday is there still a missing American crew member. We don't know if they're POW at this point, if they're dead, if they're still hiding out somewhere in the mountains. There is a search team going out to look for that airmen and obviously all of our hopes. are that they'll be found like their co-pilot was and returned. I do think it's important just from a political standpoint and just to talk about like how to shine a light on how bad Trump's assessment is of how the war is going through the prism of this. There's been a lot of bragging, a lot of braggadocia about how we own the air and we had dominated Iran in this space. It's unclear if, as Adam Kinsinger was saying maybe, you know,

There were some shipments coming in from Russia. Maybe Russia had been sharing some anti-aircraft missiles with Iran. Maybe Iran had anti-aircraft missiles that we didn't know about. Or who knows exactly what happened. But I want to go back to a comment that Trump made earlier this week. It's going to highlight just how far off these guys are from the reality on the ground. They have no anti-aircraft equipment. Their radar is 100% annihilated.

We are unstoppable as a military force. Yeah. Famous last words there. Unstoppable. Well, it's not just that. I mean, it's, and we know this, right? We know it's funny that Pam Bondi got ousted this week. Because Pete Higgs is the one who really should be in the hot seat right now because I think it's pretty clear what he has been telling Donald Trump, which is his sort of like 12-year-old version of how war, how, you know, doing warfare with lethality happens. So, like, Trump's out there saying they don't have any. capabilities, which no, genuinely, no pun intended, flies in the face of their ability to shoot our planes out of the air. And so I just, this is like, this is a now becoming a real pattern

in the war, which is that Trump vastly overstates how well things are going. There is a way in which voters start to feel very lied to when what is like the actual experience doesn't jive with what a politician is saying. So I would say, like, this happened with Joe Biden in the economy when Joe Biden was like, well, the economy is good. And voters like, but I don't feel it, that leads to them feeling sort of gaslit, which is, I think, where this is starting to be had, because he is gaslighting. I mean, Trump is genuinely gas letting us. At least Biden had real economic upturns to point to. Was the pun intended on gaslighting? Because gas is also lighting on fire. It was on flying and planes. I didn't want it to be. I got it. I got it. I didn't want to take it lightly. Yeah, yeah, no.

But you just threw out there. And that's another thing. that's happening right now. So here's how Trump is responding this morning before they put the lid out. Remember when I gave Iran 10 days to make a deal and open up the Hormuz straight, time is running out. 48 hours before all hell will rain down on them. Glory be to God. Some folks are kind of wondering that's, you know, whether that's intentional with the Aluah Akbar, kind of Christian flip, or if Trump is just, if this is Pete Hegseth doing his Christian soldier thing with him. I thought it was interesting. Bob Kagan mentioned just totally apropos like not any question I asked that he's like it does feel like that there is a, you know, kind of Christian crusade element to the messaging around this that is a little different from what he remembered from the past from the last wars in the Middle East. But anyway, 48 hours before all hell will rain down on them.

We've had a few 48 hour threats at this point. We have. We have. And it's strange to me that he keeps locking himself into these timeframes because, so okay, clock is ticking. So that means we have what all of today, which just goes back to your opening thing about calling a lid when we apparently

have a 48-hour clock on whether or not we are going to start dropping, obliterating bombs all over Iran and escalating this war significantly. I mean, Pete Hagsath called it. It's bombing them back to the Stone Age. So if like that's what we're doing, feels like someone ought to be talking to us

about these things. And sort of about writing. what we're looking at. Or the parameters of this 48 hours. But I don't know. And then there's just the nihilism that creeps in with Trump where you're like, I don't know. And it was always infrastructure week. And it was always going to be two weeks until they had a health care plan. And so then it's all the tacoing. And so then there's this part of us that just like maybe like our enemies no longer take Trump's particular time frame seriously. It seems that they're not so far. And the Iranians, there's no evidence. There's nothing I was talking to Kagan about yesterday,

the Washington Post, because it's hard to tell since, you know, we took out the top leadership of Iran, like, where the power centers are, you know, as an outsider right now, like who we would be negotiating with or dealing with. But the post story, you know, said like their sources inside Iran and the region are basically indicating that it's hardliners that have consolidated power and that there's not any negotiating at all happening. So like what would, what deal would they even come to in 48, 48 hours? It's hard to know. Yeah, well, this is why, I mean, as we sort of try to do sensemaking around what is our government doing, and like that's, that's the job, right? The job of us is to say, okay, we hear what these guys are saying. And so we're going to try to figure out what that means for America's future, for people who want to know, are we escalating a major war in the Middle East? It is very difficult to do sense making when you do not get any information when you can't trust your own government. You can't trust the Iranian government. You can't trust the American government. Trump's not talking to us, right? Not giving us new information. neither as anybody else in the administration. And so it's almost impossible to know how to analyze what we could do next, which is pretty scary. Like, that is a scary place to be. I was watching a friend of the show, S.E. Cup over on Adam Kinsinger's page. And she brought up the history of the Iran-Iraq War.

And so I'm going to shout her out by crediting this. Because I mean, I'm aware of the basic contours of the Iran-Iraq War, but it happened in 1980, I was not yet born. And so I just, I don't, like all the details I was not as familiar with. And so that sent me, like, on a little dive this morning when I woke up about, like, what the contours was that. I'm just going to read this, you know, and you're going to understand where I'm going. Here's a little summary of the early days of the Iran-Iraq War, which ended up going on from 1980 to 1988 to 1988, just for some context. Saddam Hussein launched the invasion in September of 1980, calculating that post-revolutionary Iran was weak in chaos.

He was right initially. Iraqi forces made significant gains. Iraq was doing far more damage in the first months of the war using combined arms and air power while Iran's military was in disarray. After about a week, Iraq offered Iran a ceasefire. Iran refused any ceasefire. Iraq continued doing damage to Iran. Iran continued refusing ceasefires. The war went on for eight years. I'm not saying this war is going to go on for eight years, but on the list of things where it's like, you know, the people who you would tend to have engaged before you started something like this, if you're a normal president or people who are familiar with how Iran is going to respond to something about this because they've studied Iran's history, people who are familiar with the Strait of the Hormuz tactic and what the various threats are from there. It didn't seem like these guys did any of that. I mean, some of those people still exist in the State Department, but it doesn't seem like those people were involved, and it seems like we're paying the

price from the fact that they did basically no planning and no lesson learning. from past wars with the Iranian regime. Yeah, but you don't even have to go back to 1980 to 88 when you and I were unborn and up through and I was eight years old because I was born in 1980. But depending on when that war started, I might or might not have been alive. September? No, I wasn't, I wasn't born then. I was not born.

You don't have to go back then. You can look at the part of the, I think, the lesson we were supposed to learn about wars in the Middle East is that they are very complicated. They are easy to jump into with force and then very difficult to extract from, which is I feel like that's the unlearn lesson. One of the things that I saw on the reporting was, this isn't funny, but it is sort of darkly telling, which is that when Pete Hegseth has been surprised, he has expressed surprise at Iran's ability to fight back. well, that's alarming. It's alarming that our secretary of war seems to be caught very off guard by the idea that the enemy in this might have a vote in how we engage. Yeah, well, the result of that lack of preparation is the damage that's been caused to all of these

people in the focus groups and everybody in the country. I just pulled up where we are for this weekend on our crude oil price of barrel. It's at $112 a barrel. I went to the 10-year history. The highest I see here in the 10-year is 116. So we're almost at the peak for the last decade, and that was a brief spike after Russia invaded Ukraine. And it was last time that there was this kind of disruption. Axia story this morning is saying that the worst-case scenario for some analysts is $200 a barrel if Hormuz stays closed.

So that's what we're sitting out right now, almost at a 10-year peak, with a worst-case catastrophe scenario of it being about double that. Yeah, I mean, JVL and I talked about this a bunch on The Seeker Pot, and so this is really his point, but I agree with it, which is there are, of course, many, many white papers lying around that will tell you that one of the ways Iranians may have responded to an attack from us or from Israel is by closing the Strait of Hormuz. It was entirely something that could have been anticipated.

It simply was not. And so now this has become the choke point, literally, but in this war where to get out of it, for Trump to not and Republicans to not suffer like tremendous internal collapse of support, they can't let gas prices get that high. Like the affordability element of all of this is so essential, which means that now Iran has more leverage over us than I think. clearly than Pete Hegseth had believed, because that is, that is just the direct relationship is they now control this. Their terms for getting out of it is that they continue to control the Strait of Hormuz, which if that happens, we have basically helped Iran become more powerful

in the future and have more leverage over global domestic oil supply and the way that politicians have to respond to their own countries who care desperately about the price of oil, which, by the way, not just gas prices, but so many other prices. And so it is, it's a calamity. A calamity. A calamity. I can unimaginable calamity, honestly. All right. Well, we'll leave it there for now. No lid on the bulwark. So if some news happens, we'll pop back on and go check out Sarah's focus group. And anything else you want to argue about, Sarah? Do you want to argue about them? I mean, we could do round two on Hassan if you wanted to. I mean, I actually, can I just say, can we do just like two seconds on discourse on discourse? People love discourse on discourse. People love

discourse on discourse and discourse and discourse. I was, just really quick way you think about your two seconds and discourse on discourse. I was last night. I've never felt more 2026 content creator than last night because I was, my friends were over and someone had texted them and said, hey, Hassan's talking about our thing. And so they put it on the TV at my house. And so I was watching Hassan, watch me and you and talk about it. And I was feeling very metaverse. I'm not having that experience. experience. Let me guess. I was unpopular. You were unpopular on his stream. You were a popular on his stream. I will say. I would say you're not that popular on his stream. Yeah. I would say like there's people on Twitter who were like, man, the comments on the video that we did. Like this is a, you know, I can't believe these are bored commenters. And I'm a little bit like, guys, Hassan was streaming it and like people were coming over to our video to comment. It's also, I would say, for a video that you and I do a pretty low engagement video. Right. Yeah. No, they're actually way more of comments. A lot of the other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's very high engagement on like so on Twitter and, you know, other places. Well, like, it's a high engagement on the people who are commenting, but low in terms of people who want to engage with the content.

Which means it's like terminally online people are invested in this debate much more than like average Americans, which led me to just think, this is the kind of my two seconds on, on, I'm not sure if we failed to do this or if it's just we did it over the course of an hour. And so people don't see the distilled version of it, which is I think there's two. debates happening. There's a question that has been raised of do Democrats embrace Hassan Piker, the guy, the man, which I'm a no on as like him, because I don't think that we should either embrace or wave away some of the really sort of toxic, illiberal things that he has said. That being said, the voters who are attracted to what Hassan is saying, the reality of of the fact that support for Israel among Democrats and independence has fallen off a cliff. It is at historical lows. That's a different conversation. One of the things, one of the, like,

the comments from people who've, it is funny, one of the, the meta discourse, discourse things is people were like, you don't engage with his content. And so how can you talk about him? You don't understand anything about Democratic voters. And I was a little bit like, yeah, that also applies to me. Like, if you listen to me, you would know, actually, I know quite a lot about the voters. perfectly willing, not just willing, it is, it's all over my book, is talking about how much this issue is changing, how animating it is for Democratic voters. And that when it comes to building a big, broad coalition, people who are concerned about our relationship with Israel, like, that's a big number. That's not a, that's not a marginal number, right? And so I think my point was,

or my point is and remains, that you absolutely have to engage those voters. But Democratic, should do it not by being like, I've got to put my arm around Hassan, Piker to do it, but by saying, I have my own opinions on how America's relationship with Israel is being handled and here it is. Like, that is what I think Democrats should do. And there's a lot of like, why are these former Republicans talking about democratic stuff? And can I just say on this point always, we're just Americans with opinions. Like everybody else.

Also, I've voted for more of the last Democrat, the last three Democratic. presidential nominees than Hassan has. That's right. We've certainly done quite a bit more to elect Democrats over a year. I'm three for three on the last three. Yeah, no, I'm with you on that. I guess the thing, my one little distinction from that comment is I wasn't really out there arguing for embrace.

What I was opposing to is attack. And there's space between attack and embrace, embrace. And I think if people want to their individual level attack and that's fine, other streamers or I do it. But I just, my thing is like Democratic politicians right now just have this huge gap with these voters. And like they need to show them and demonstrate that they care and they're mad about this war and they're mad about the way that our relationship with Israel is part of this war, but that's not just Israel, but also, you know, UAE and MBS and, and we don't want this.

The Americans don't want to be in these wars in the Middle East. They don't want to pay more for gas. And this is a stupid war and it's managed horribly and we're doing it in lockstep with Israel. And it's the opposite of what Trump promised. It's getting away from us. It's deeply scary. Yeah. They should be yelling at that. I think there are a lot of Democrats, I just would say that, If you asked a voter in your focus group, like, what does your congressman, your generic Democratic congressman think about this war? I think a lot of voters would be like,

I don't know. The Democrats are opposed to it, but like they haven't, you know, they seem to be kind of playing both sides a little bit. Whether that's fair or not. I think that's the impression of the party right now. And I just think that the party has a lot of work to do to gain credibility with those voters,

to be clear eye on this. And I think like attacking prominent anti-war people hurt you in the effort to do that. And that was really my, anyway, that's my one distinction for what you're saying. Yeah. And I'll just, I would say one distinction for me, too, is that like, there's, there's what Sarah Longwell thinks herself. And Sarah Longwell herself doesn't want to rock with Hassan. That's true. That is real true. There's also Sarah Longwell, the analyst who listens to voters, who is acutely aware of if Democrats are going to build a big, broad coalition, right? They've got to figure out how to say what they believe about these things.

Like when they create a vacuum, I did talk about this yesterday. People didn't engage with it too much. It's like, I always say this. If Democrats or Republicans actually won't take a strong position on, let's say, immigration, the authoritarian's will. And it's going to be way worse. And so, like, if Democrats won't engage in a way that I think they believe,

like what bothers me is that I think most Democrats are rip shit about this war. think it's been handled, but they're not talking about it that much, like, or not in a cacophony. And so if you don't do that, then, like, people will outsource it to the Hassan bikers of the world. And so the demand, I think, like, the demands are getting confused in this conversation, where the demand shouldn't be whether Democrats do or do not embrace Hassan Piker. The question should be, are Democrats speaking out forcefully in opposition to this war? Are they saying that they themselves will change some of the way that our relationships operate with some of these actors internationally where like we now have a thing we're like we're doing uh we're

opposed to our NATO allies we're going to do whatever we want you know with where that MBS wants us to do or like or what Bibi wants us to do that are more in their interest than ours like those are legitimate things to talk about and work through and so um that to me was the bigger thing all right I don't know I thought we were an argue about something else like brunch or something but that's okay we can do more of that uh we'll keep coming back to that discourse to the extent people I appreciate everybody. We will subscribe to the feed. Please tell your friends. We'll be talking to you all soon.