Morning Wire - A 'More Reasonable Regime' & NASA's Next Moonshot | 3.31.26

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

President Trump seeks a peace deal as the White House weighs the potential for boots on the ground, Cuba receives much-needed economic relief via a Russian oil tanker, and NASA prepares to launch the first manned mission around the moon in more than 50 years. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.- - -Ep. 2709- - -Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3- - -Today's Sponsors:Alliance Defending Freedom - Visit https://JoinADF.com/WIRE or text 'WIRE' to 83848 to learn more.Shopify - Sign up for your $1-per-month trial and start selling today at https://Shopify.com/morningwire- - -Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacymorning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Trump says talks are underway with a more reasonable group inside Iran, but Warren's time is running out. But you never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley. It's Tuesday, March 31st, and this is Morning Wire. As Cuba's energy grid remains on the brink of collapse, a Russian oil tanker heads toward the island. Does this signal the end of the Trump blockade? This tanker is basically just a band-aid on an aging energy infrastructure that is basically the government's own doing to itself. And for the first time since the Apollo era, NASA is sending astronauts back to the moon. The astronauts will be the farthest humans ever from the Earth on any flight. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.

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or else face crushing fines and penalties. Alliance Defending Freedom is sounding the alarm on the DSA. ADF is also supporting a historic law. lawsuit from X that challenges the DSA in court. Your gift to ADF now helps fight the growing threat of censorship and advance your free speech. For a limited time, your gift will be matched. Visit join ADF.com slash wire or textwire to 83848 to have your gift to protect free speech doubled. That's join ADF.com slash wire or text wire to 8348 to have your gift matched. As the White House weighs the potential for boots on the ground, President Trump is offering

new threats to Iran. Wired in live host, Cabot Phillips, joins us now with the latest on Operation Epic Fury. So, Cabot, we just reached day 31 in this mission. President Trump just issued the latest ultimatum. What is he saying now? Well, first, the president and his top advisors are no doubt going to be meeting today to review those plans for Iran as they continue debating whether or not to deploy ground troops. We mentioned yesterday that Trump is weighing using ground forces to open the trade of Hormuz, and now the Wall Street Journal says he's also considering deploying special forces and other infantry elements to locate and then bring back 1,000 pounds of enriched uranium deep within Iran. That would obviously be a highly complex and risky move, but some of the

White House say it could be the only way to fully ensure the regime never attains a nuclear weapon. As he weighs his options, the president said Monday that his administration is engaged in, quote, serious discussions with a new and more reasonable regime to end our military operations in Iran. He also adds that, quote, great progress has been made. However, he did say that if a deal is not reached and the Strait of Hormuz is not opened very soon, quote, we will conclude our lovely stay in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells, and Carg Island, and possibly all desalienization plants, which we have purposely not yet touched. So that represents what would be a massive escalation. A huge one. Now, President Trump is

claiming that these talks are proceeding successfully? What are we hearing from the Iranians? Well, they continue to maintain that no direct talks have taken place and that they're not interested in a deal. Iran's Speaker of the Parliament went as far as issuing a statement implying President Trump's claims of peace talks were little more than a ruse to give markets a boost. And to that point, it is true that stocks have typically jumped whenever Trump makes a post about peace talks.

But the White House said Monday that despite their public defiance, behind closed doors, the Iranians are much more receptive to a deal. Have a listen. Despite all of the public posturing you hear from the regime and false reporting, talks are continuing and going well. What is said publicly is, of course, much different than what's being communicated to us privately. And we also heard yesterday from Secretary of State Marco Rubio,

who in a fiery interview responded to critics claiming that President Trump does not have a clear set of objectives for this conflict. Here they are. You should write them down. Number one, the destruction of their Air Force. Number two, the destruction of their Navy. Number three, the severe diminishing of their missile launching capability. And number four, the destruction of their factory so they can't make more missiles and more drones to threaten us in the future.

All of this so that they can never hide behind it to acquire a nuclear weapon. And if you listen closely there, you'll see that notably absent from that list was regime change. Remember, when he announced that this bombing campaign had begun last month, the president said that once the military operation was complete, the Iranian people should quote. quote, take over your government, it will be yours to take. But to this point, we've not seen really any indicators that such an uprising is brewing or even imminent. I spoke to Ben and Ben Taliblu from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Here's what he had to say. I don't think we should be putting the car before the horse when it comes to trying to ask why an unarmed population is not going to go out into the streets while bombs from friendly countries are falling on their own territory. I think that would be a suicide mission for the Iranian people to do that. Unfortunately, they're not doing that. the question is, do they have the resolve and the wherewithal and the willingness to actually be able to go out once major military operations that have concluded? And much of that does depend

on political messaging throughout these operations. And on that topic, according to Axios, President Trump even rebuffed Benjamin Nanyahu on a phone call last week when Nanyahu suggested that the White House urged demonstrators to get out in protest. Trump reportedly said, quote, why the hell should we tell people to take to the streets when they'll just get mowed down? But for his part, publicly at least, President Trump is now saying that a so-called regime change has already taken place just because of how many top officials have been killed. In his words, quote, the one regime was decimated. They're all dead. The next regime is mostly dead.

Now there's a, quote, whole different group of people who have been very reasonable. Well, definitely fog of war happening here. Cabot, thanks for reporting. Absolutely. Starting something new like a business or podcast isn't just hard. terrifying too. So much work goes into the thing that you're not entirely sure will work out, and it can be hard to make that leap of faith. Luckily, our sponsor Shopify is on your side to help you launch and achieve your dreams. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of

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Head over to Shopify.com slash morning wire. Again, that's shopify.com slash morning Cuba will receive much-needed relief today with the arrival of a Russian oil tanker. After enforcing a strict embargo, the Trump administration is easing restrictions to allow for humanitarian aid to the island. Joining us now with the latest is Daily Wire contributor Tim Peers-A-Tim. So we've been tracking this crisis in Cuba pretty closely. We're now seeing Russia getting involved here. First, how bad are things now in Cuba? Well, Cuba's power grid has never been robust. But they, This U.S. blockade has pushed it to the breaking point. Blackouts are constant.

Critical services on the island are severely restricted. And for those who have generators or vehicles, the price of fuel has soared. Warning War spoke to Sandy Acosta. She's the director of government affairs at the Wilson Center about the crisis. Here's what she said. Cuba's energy system basically runs near the edge of total collapse on a daily basis. Two and a half years ago, they had total blackouts. They had a total countrywide blackout a few weeks ago.

This tanker is basically just a band-aid on an aging and abandoned infrastructure of energy infrastructure that is basically the government's ondoing to itself. Even with this tanker from Russia, the situation in Cuba still looks bleak. The amount of relief that the extra fuel will bring will be gone in a matter of days. Here's Acosta again. For my analysis, it'll basically take them three to seven, days to process through their refineries. It's Russian crude, which is a lot easier for them to process than Venezuelan crude. And then they'll distribute it out probably a week or so after that,

prioritizing their failing medical system, which doesn't provide much anyway to the poor given people, and prioritizing their own facilities. So this tanker seems to be a very short-term reprieve, and the island will be right back to where it was in less than a couple of weeks. So crisis certainly not averted at this point. We've seen some reports that this Russian tanker could be more than just a humanitarian mission. There could be political purposes here. Can you break down that speculation for us? Yeah, there are a lot of theories going around that this could be some sort of test or a move by Russia to maintain influence in Cuba. Here's what a cost of made of it. You've got reporting on all fronts, even among civil society leaders on the island, basically saying this is not a fix. This is just a test. of, you know, by the Russians on the Trump administration, and that it also may be a way of getting in some kind of either intelligence gathering information or, you know, utilizing the oil

shipments, which the Russian media has said is all, you know, in favor of supporting humanitarian needs for their ally. But the reality is there could be all sorts of other than nefarious things hiding behind that. So with this in mind that there is probably some sort of Russian interest here beyond helping a friend, what is Washington's view of this? Why did President Trump make the decision to allow this tanker to go through? Yeah, the president said over the weekend that one tanker of oil will not make much of a difference, and neither will it save the Cuban government from collapse. That said, if countries want to send humanitarian aid to the island, he has no problem with that.

I told them if a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem with. Cuba's Finnish. They have a bad regime. They have very bad and corrupt leadership. and whether or not they get a boat of oil, it's not going to matter. Acosta, however, has another take that this decision could serve Washington's interests as well. I think to some extent it's demonstrating, it might be demonstrating a way of showing that they're willing to negotiate and that they mean business, that they're not going to let up on the hard stuff, and that there need to be some serious concessions. You know, they mentioned 51 political prisoners being released. there are no names.

There's, there, there's, no one knows, there hasn't been any real movement towards that. Are they serious? And so I think it's a, I think, I think we're at the beginning of a, of a next phase of this conversation between, you know, the U.S., Cuba and Russia, this, this, this nice, three-part conversation. So we'll just have to see where negotiations go from here. For now, this Russian tanker appears to be more about politics than bringing any last relief to Cuba. Lots of political calculations going into this on all sides, no doubt. Tim,

thanks so much for reporting. Thanks for having me on. This week, NASA will launch Artemis 2, the first manned mission around the moon in over 50 years. Daily Wire reporter Cassie Akiva has the latest. So Cassie, a lot of excitement about this launch for good reason. We haven't seen anything like this in half a century. So what do we know about this launch? So Artemis 2 is part of the Artemis program, which aims to return America. actually on the moon for the first time in 50 years. Now, this mission will not go to the moon, but it will go around the moon. It's sort of a test flight to get things ready to, you know, return to the moon. So I interviewed a former NASA astronaut Leroy Chow who flew four space

missions and commanded the International Space Station. And he talks about why this is such an important moment. The main purpose is to check out the Orion spacecraft, really exercise, the life support systems, thermal control. systems, com systems with astronauts on board. Three years earlier, there was the launch of Artemis 1, and it was a similar flight, but with no astronauts on board. The biggest thing to come back from that mission was heavy damage to the heat shield, much more than we expected. And so that's why it's taken three years for all the smart engineers at NASA and the contractors get their arms around what was going on and get confidence that the changes that they've made will make it safe for

astronauts to fly this one. If the first 24 hours in space go well, the astronauts will head towards the moon and set several historic first. It's going to take them on what's called a free return trajectory around the moon. That is, the trajectory is designed such that the vehicle will travel to the moon, go past it and then the gravity of the moon will kind of swing it back around towards the earth. So one interesting aspect of this is that the astronauts will be the farthest humans, uh, the farthest humans ever from the Earth on any flight. So if this trip is going around the moon but

not landing on it, is an actual moon landing, something we can expect with an Artemis 3? So not quite. According to Chow, Artemis 3 is going to test lunar landing modules created by Blue Origin and SpaceX, and maybe both if they are both created in time. And Artemis 4 and 5 will be landing on the moon. It all goes well. And the current plan as Artemis 4 will actually touch down once we gain confidence that the landers that we've tested in orbit are going to work. So we'll keep our fingers crossed and see how quickly that can get done. And beyond the scheduled Artemis missions, the next plan is to actually create a moon base. The priority is to get some pieces on the ground on the moon in the South Pole area, which is the area of interest.

And starting with probably, you know, just putting some, basic elements down, and then a big goal is to launch a nuclear reactor and landed on the moon. Now, why do you want a nuclear reactor on the moon? Number one, you're going to get a lot of power out of there, which is what you're going to need for a lunar base. Number two, the moon by treaty, of which all the major powers are signatories, nobody can own the moon. So a very ambitious plan we have for the next few years. Did Chow speak to why it's taken us 50 years to go back? So I asked Child's exact question because I found it interesting that the majority of Americans alive today were not alive the last time humans were on the moon. So he said that the space race was a big factor in getting us there so quickly and that we haven't really had that in a while.

But now with China planning to send astronauts to the moon by 2030, I think the race is back on. We're only now about to launch the first astronauts. To put that in perspective, consider the Apollo missions. we went from no NASA, no rockets, no astronauts, and then the creation of NASA to landing humans on the moon in just under 11 years, right? Pretty incredible. We invented all that stuff, launch pads, rockets, astronauts, you know, spacecraft. And now here we are 22 years into the current exploration program, and we're just launching the first astronauts. So hopefully under this administration and this administrator, Jared Isaac, man, I'm a fan of his, I think he's what's been

needed to shake this agency up. So this is all very exciting and you can look forward to seeing the space launch this Wednesday at 624 Eastern and we will be streaming it on the Daily Wire. All right. Well, Cassie, we are looking forward to it. Thanks for reporting. Thank you. Thanks for waking up with us and for those listening to the show. You can also now watch the show free on Daily Wire Plus. We'll be back this evening with more new shoot to know.