Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Bleating Iran Strategy Is Spiraling Out of Control

Episode Date: April 19, 2026

Sam Stein and Sarah Longwell discuss the latest chaos in Trump’s Iran strategy, from collapsing negotiations to escalating threats that may be pushing the U.S. toward a much bigger conflict, and the growing concern that even his own team is managing around him.

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blending since 1999. Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein. I am back from vacation, joined by Sarah Longwell, our fearless publisher. Thank God. It's great to be back.

You might be noticing I'm a bit red, slightly tanner than usual. Here's what happened. My family and I went down to Key West for a couple days, and a family friend decided that it would be fun to go on a boat together. You might not know this,

but the Jewish composition and constitution doesn't do very well with seafaring, and we all got absolutely viciously nauseous, and three of the four family members of the Steinclan puked over the side. And this one decided the best thing to do is just lay in the front of the boat like this the entire time. I did put on sunscreen, but I left that episode very red. This is like four days later. Yeah, I was going to say, you look golden.

Like, I just want to say, like, stay gold, pony boy. You look great. Yeah, it wasn't like this. It was not like this. I've been putting a lot of lotion on. I've been putting ice packs on. Ice packs. It was bad.

It was torched. Anyways, it's great to be with axe, Sarah. I'm glad to have you. We have a lot to get through. We are recording this around 3, 15 p.m. on Sunday. And it looks like our president has bleated his way back into a war, this time, potentially worse than before. Because shortly before we jumped on, news broke that the Iranian negotiators have decided they're not

going to actually go to Islamabad and meet. with the Trump team. Now, everything is definitely, you know, dynamic and fluid. Who knows what happens by the time this posts. But this seems to be a direct product of Trump bloviating on truth and saying and then not getting rid of the blockade of Iran and then talking about a deal that maybe didn't actually exist in theory, but insisting that it did. I don't know, Sarah, I've been catching up because I've been off. What's like, what's the real, what's your real take on this? What do you think is going on here? My real take is that you can go on vacation for a week.

And when you come back, we're going to be at exactly the same place. Right. We keep jumping on in the weekend. And then, like, Trump does something to calm the market, usually just before Monday. And then often tries to calm the market before everybody leaves on, before it closes on Fridays. And so sometimes you get sort of, like, rational behavior in these spurts when he feels like the pressure's on. And then he just freaks out and starts bleeding on truth social, which is. is how we conduct foreign policy these days. And I want to say this has been chaotic from the start.

So I was following this morning and I was trying to figure out who they were sending on the envoy and there were mixed reports coming out about who was even going. Was J.D. Vance the lead negotiator? Or was it going to be Whitkoff and Jared? Like which of these three stooges was going to be the one to see this deal fall apart? Turns out it was Trump with his thumbs actually who, because he's again threatening to bomb everything. Like the truth sounds very similar to the ones before. It's like, if you don't sign this deal, which is a deal he says already happened. But if you don't sign this deal, we're going to bomb all your stuff again. I guess, you know, I had this sort of sensation that it's classic Trump in the worst way, right?

It's like, oh, everyone just assumes that this is negotiating tactic and he's just, you know, talking in this maximalist posture and that it's really not going to happen. But why do we have to assume that? Like, why do we have to play by these rules? At some point, you know, maybe he does go forward with it. But it's just, it's an absurd thing. to threaten to wipe out power plants and kill a bunch of people as a negotiating tactic. So you can see it right here. It's a lot of words, but eventually it gets down to something about,

and I hope they take it because if they don't, the United States is going to knock out every single power plant, every single bridge in Iran. No more Mr. Nice guy. They'll come down fast. I'm talking about oil prices. They'll come down easy. And if they don't take the deal, it will be my honor to do what has to be done. And it's just like we've been here before. And this is the thing. The Iranians know we've been here before, right? Like, this is the problem. I mean, look, there's a million problems with conducting foreign policy on his janky personal social media site. But one of them is he's already threatened to take out an entire civilization. We've already been on, hey, Trump's going to bomb everything watch. And guess what he did. It seems like, especially in retrospect now with the information we have, he made up a fake, like maybe they did restart negotiations, but he was like, it's all over. It's done. We've got. a deal. And then remember, we started seeing different versions of the points of the deal come out. And it became clear pretty quickly. These were not conditions that we could possibly agree to, not without America being not only humiliated, but in like a much worse position than when we

started. So now the Iranians are like, well, this guy just says stuff. And, you know, he's so, he's too afraid to do anything. Well, just to backtrack. So the initial, I'm hoping I get the chronology right here, but they had announced a tentative agreement around 10-point principle plan. And the 10-point plan was, to your point, it would have made the Obama-era deal look like, you know, a diplomatic feat. It was huge sanctions relief, billions of dollars for the Iranians, no real long-term cap on their nuclear ambitions. And then in exchange, the Strait of Hermuz would still be told by the Iranian. So it was like all these things that it didn't make sense.

It would put us in a worse position in some degree. Remember at one point we were going to do joint tolls with the Iranians? Remember Trump announced that? With crypto or something like that. Like that wasn't a real thing. And also when you was talking about the Obama deal, this is actually, these are actually different things. Like following this is impossible.

But at one point it was we were going to give them, I can't remember how many billions. It was. 20 billion, I believe. In order to secure uranium rights. which then the Iranians quickly said, yeah, we're not giving that to you. Like, that's not a thing that's happening. And so we, I mean, I've always said that we can't trust our government in this. Like, you cannot trust Trump any of this.

But you really can't. I mean, literally everything coming out seems to be disproven in short order. Well, let's, can we stay on that for a second? Because this is the, this is the theme, right? It's like, what can you trust from him? So the contours of any agreement that he's announcing seem to be easily disproven within a couple hours. On the flip side, these maximalist threats to wipe out the civilization, bomb all the power plants, so on and so forth, take out the bridges. I guess you can't trust those either because he always, I don't want to say chickens out, he always doesn't take that ramp.

And yet I find myself not willing to completely dismiss the idea that he be willing to do that. Am I foolish for that? I don't know. It's like I still find myself bothered by and scared for the possibility that he will go forward with some sort of insane quasi-genocidal campaign in Iran. I mean, I don't think that that's wrong of you because ultimately what happens here is you get into a battle of egos. Like this is because this is Trump's war, because he launched it without Congress and because he doesn't have real negotiators next to him. This is a war now of Trump's id. I think we've all believed in different permutations across the bulwark that he would find some way out of this that was meant to be face saving.

But we also all said that like that might not be possible because the other side was going to have a vote on this. Well, hold on. Because there was a way. It's not like a full way out, but like let's just put it the straight of Hermuz, right? As of a couple days ago, there was some sort of agreement that it would be reopened and that maybe they would do a toll on some ships, but it was going to be open. Trump announced it. And then Trump went ahead and was like, you know what? We're keeping the blockade on Iran in place, which then prompted the Iranians to say, well, then if you're

going to do that, we're going to close the Strait of Fus. And we just got word like this afternoon that there are now zero ships, zero ships. This is from the Kobiasi letter, which has been monitoring stuff. Zero oil tankers have passed through the Strait of Formuz today. It appears that the Strait of Formuz is now completely closed. This is the first time in history, and that's because of the blockade. So he does, to your, I just want to say, there are kind of off-ramps if he's wanting to take it, but he keeps fucking it up and stepping on ranks. Yeah, and I don't know if you, did you see this, that they are, they got passage for a couple ships.

Like, they were sanctioned to go through, and then the Iranians started to fire on them. And so it's the people in the ships saying, you told us we could go. SEPA Navy, SEPA, Navy. This is Motoring-Sand-Marhead. You gave me clearance to go. My name second on your list. You gave me clearance to go. You are fighting now.

Let me turn back. And this is, again, before this whole thing started, before America and Israel decided to do this, the Strait of Hormuz was open and oil was moving through it. And so now, now all of the objectives, again, the objectives being complete and total surrender by Iran, which is what we were told, now it appears the only objective is can we get the Strait of Hormuz open so that, oil can pass through because the entire world is freaking out about the accelerating oil prices and what it will do to the economy if we do not have the straightforward moves, which appears to be a contingency and a thing that nobody in our American government seems to. No, that's absurd. I can't fathom that.

Yeah, maybe in our government for sure. But there was that old Iranian principle on the NSA, I believe, who actually served for Trump, who came out and was like, no, this was definitely talked about as a likely outcome if we had Iraq to Iran. And the other thing, of course, now is that Iran knows it can use this as a leverage point, right? It wasn't clear if that was possible, but they clearly can do it now. Yeah, so like, then what happened? So somebody warned them and they just decided, like, we don't care. I mean, every piece of reporting we see about this, Trump appears completely caught off guard by the fact that they now have this leverage. Did you, did you read the big Wall Street Journal

piece last night about all this? I read clips. I read clips of it. Quick summary of his. Trump is basically, he gets bored of it. Yeah. And he gets angry at it. And he doesn't know what to do about it. And he's mad at people. And the opening android is when those two fighter pilots were shot down and he freaked out and he wanted to absolutely get them back right away.

And the military was like, whoa, you got to figure out if this is like safe to do. Anyways, this graph really stood out. I'm going to read it for people who are listening and I'm watching. Trump demanded that the military, go get them immediately. This is the fighter pilots. But the U.S. hadn't been on the ground in Iran since the government overthrow that led to the hostage crisis. and they needed to figure out how to get into the treacherous Iranian territory and avoid Tehran's own military.

AIDS kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn't be helpful. Instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said, what if I, what a damning, damning, embarrassing paragraph. But this is my point that I was saying to earlier when I'm saying this is being conducted by Trump. Trump's id. Like right now, the only way to do this is by people getting Trump away from the process. But because there's no way that actual people in our government thinks that him bleeding like this is a good idea and is useful for the negotiations. We don't even have regular diplomats. Like it's his business deal buddy Whitkoff and his son-in-law, who by the way has

extensive business in the region. In fact, both of them do. Anyway, I don't know what to say about that other than this is the thing. If Trump is doing it himself and he gets backed into a corner and he thinks he's about to be humiliated, that it blows up, no pun intended. His art of the deal thing, that's why he has to look for an offerant. But if he gets cornered, this is when I think he could start bombing things for real. Well, and this is what Barack Ravid, who's like the Axis reporter, he's an ad-sec reporter. He's about as plugged in with the administration as you can get, gets a lot of scoops from them.

But he had a summary of the situation, and it was pretty sobering. basically he talked to Trump. We should talk about this and in a second about these like periodic phone calls that Trump makes to a million journals. But you can see up here, Ravine is saying the second bullet point is what kind of stands out.

The Iranians believe Trump's optimistic statements are a deception and a cover for a surprise American attack. And then the fourth one, the Iranians, other hand, are lowering expectations. Even Clement, there's no negotiation around with the U.S. this week. Rainian officials suspect that the U.S. might attack them

before the end of the ceasefire on Tuesday night. I mean, we're not in a great diplomatic spot if you believe you're going to get attached prior to the NFC. But that's a card Trump has done before, right? I mean, this was, I believe, how the first Iranian operation started was there was there was supposed to be some sort of talk in there and then they just hit. And so I think they are not going to go down that road again. And that's why we have word that the Iranians are not going to show up in Pakistan.

Yeah. And this is where the longer this goes on, the more Trump's moves become transparent and the less opportunity he has to sort of do your madman theory. Yeah. They're basically, they're ready to call his bluff. Which means he's got at some point do it. Do the thing or walk away with far less than what he had. What a mess.

All right, before we go, what do you make of these like little three to five minute phone calls that he keeps doing with a journalist? It's so stupid at this point. If you're a journalist getting the call, I mean, I understand why you take a call from the president, whatever. But you've got to tweet it out with some skepticism at this. juncture. It's just ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I just think this is a function of Trump's narcissism, right?

Like, he wants to be seen as in charge and he likes people calling up. It allows him to continue to sew chaos and play people. Like, I have thought this whole time, like, he's not trying to give us good information. He's not trying to help us. What gave that away, Sarah? He's not trying to help us better understand this. So, like, it's great that they can get him on the phone. I'm not sure it's actually helping us get more information about anything. I've been wondering what I would ask him if I got him on the phone. And I know I had only like three or five minutes. And it's like, you know, he's just going to lie to you about stuff.

So like, what do you say? So are you really going to bomb civilization to like the Stone Ages? I mean, I would ask him, why are you still the president? Can you please get out of here? You're obviously destroying the country. Maybe I would ask him if he felt like. Less a question and more a statement from me. Yeah.

Well, Sarah, let me talk to you. No, I think I would ask him now, I guess, why did you, why did your own advisors keep you out of a discussion? He's just going to be like, that didn't happen. Fake news. Yeah, that's true. He'll just be like fake news. Who are you?

All right. Well, Trump, if you're watching, come on the pod. Sarah, thank you for doing this. Appreciate it. You would take Trump on the pod. Get out of here. To yell at him, not to glean anything from it. Well, it would be adversarial, but that's the point.

All right. Thank you for doing this. Thank you guys for watching the take. Appreciate it. Missed you guys. Great to be back in the feed. Subscribe to the bulwark where you get conversations just like this. Take care.

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Just stop. Booster juice is going nuts for hazelnut. Introducing the nutty monkey smoothie, holy hazelnut assay bowl, and nutty booster ball. All made with rich, creamy hazelnut spread. Try them today. Only at booster juice. Canadian-born. Blending since 1999.

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