What A Day - Trump's Lonely War

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Today marked the start of two days of services for the late South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, with President Donald Trump joining foreign leaders at Washington National Cathedral for the funeral. Graham was arguably one of the biggest supporters of the Iran war. But now, he's gone – and the war he helped start is becoming increasingly unpopular. The Economist reported earlier this month that the war in Iran is America's least popular conflict since public poll tracking began. And thanks to a virtual Pentagon blackout on information, there's a lot we don't even know about this war in the first place. So, to talk more about the Iran war, we spoke with Tom Bowman. He's the Pentagon correspondent for NPR.And in headlines, wildfires across France and Spain have driven roughly 330,000 people from their homes and vacation sites; Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear sent Kentucky Republican Senator McConnell a letter demanding that he prove that he can do his job; and a conservative activist group released audio tapes that appear to show former President Joe Biden sharing classified information with a biographer.Show Notes: Check out Tom's work – npr.org/people/5457129/tom-bowman Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

reporters that have been covering the Pentagon for a long time, we refused to sign this edict, which basically said you can't solicit information from anyone at the Pentagon. Basically, you can't go to your sources and say, hey, what's really going on with the depleted munitions, missiles, how many do they have, who's worried about it, and so forth? What the edict said was you basically have to wait for us to release information, and only then can you report on it, which basically turns us into stenographers and not journalism. I'm Jane Koston, and this is Wadaday, a show that wasn't really wondering what former New York City mayor and former attorney for President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani,

was up to, but now knows via Rudy Giuliani. Bono Seder. Yes, yes, yes. We are in Italy, but we're in a very special place. We're on top of virtually a mountain. It's called Marliana. It's about 20 miles from Monte Cotini and about. about 40 or 50 miles from Florence, equal from Pisa.

But it's more important than that. This was the birthplace of my paternal grandfather, for whom I am named. Take notes. That's how you do a proof of life video. On today's show, we get into Trump's war of choice in Iran and how reporters are making sense of it with little to no help from the Pentagon with NPR's Tom Bowman. Before we get into the irony of a president claiming no more Forever Wars and then starting a new one, here's what we're following today, Tuesday, July 28th.

But no matter how heated things got in Washington, virtually everyone, Republican or Democrat, liked Lindsay, well, not everybody, but it sounds good, not everybody. He was a tough cookie, okay, I have to be, I have to veer from this first. He was a tough cookie, darling. President Trump, almost sounded normal as he spoke before guests gathered at Washington National Cathedral for Lindsay Graham's funeral. Emphasis on almost. Those in attendance included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Higzeth, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. Earlier today, Graham's flag-draped casket arrived to a tribute at the U.S. Capitol where the Republicans served for more than 30 years.

It's a start of two days of services. Graham will be buried Wednesday in his home state of South Carolina. Graham died suddenly earlier this month at his home in Washington, following a whirlwind trip to a NATO summit in Turkey and a visit to Ukraine. He was 71. Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell has now been in the hospital for more than a month. And on Monday, Kentucky governor, Andy Bashir sent McConnell a letter demanding that he either proved that he can do his job or resign from office.

Bashir addresses his letter to McConnell, assuming, quote, that he is capable of reading and responding verbally, and not incapacitated by means of consciousness or cognition. And the governor makes it clear that McConnell's total non-participation in the actions of the Senate and lack of transparency with Kentuckians is a non-starter. Quote, I understand anyone's desire for privacy, but when you run for office and serve as one of a state's two U.S. senators, you willingly abdicate much of your personal privacy. That's the deal, and we all know it when we run. Bashir also sent a copy of the letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune. He wrote if McConnell will not show his capacity to continue serving, Thune should investigate and begin the process of removing McConnell from office. Bashir ends the letter, quote,

Kentuckians are just asking you to be honest. So this was high early on in 2009. I just found all the classified. stuff downstairs. A conservative activist group has released audio tapes that appear to show former President Joe Biden sharing classified information with a biographer. The interviews occurred before his election to the presidency in 2020. The release of audio and transcripts by the Oversight Project comes after Biden lost a legal fight to keep his conversations with his memoir, a ghostwriter private. The right-wing group first sued to obtain the tapes after Special Counsel Robert Hurd decided in

24 not to charge Biden for how he handled classified information. Biden cooperated with Heirs inquiry and told the special prosecutor during his presidency that he did not intentionally mishandle any classified material. A Biden spokesperson blasted the release as politically motivated. Because of course it was. Huge wildfires have driven roughly 330,000 people from homes and vacation sites across France and Spain. In Spain, people are bracing for another summer heat wave as the country deals with the largest fire in its recorded history. And in France, a fire west of Bordeaux has burned an area four times the size of Paris, forcing 220,000 people to evacuate.

France's interior minister, Laurent Nunes, said over the weekend it was, quote, very likely the largest civilian evacuation operation ever carried out in the country outside of war. And that's the news. Let's talk about the late Lindsay Graham and the war on Iran. Graham was an incredibly outspoken supporter of the Iran War. In fact, there was arguably no bigger supporter of the Iran war than Lindsey Graham. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal shared footage from an unreleased documentary about Graham, where the senator celebrated while watching President Trump discuss strikes in Iran shortly after the war began.

Look what we've done here. I almost cried. I mean, like, how long have we been pushing this? You've been pushing this for years, right? Right. It's here. I'm talking to Trump is born. Oh, he's Jack.

It's the best thing I've ever done. He loves. He loves blowing stuff up. Yeah, that's probably true. But now, Graham is gone, and the war he helps start is becoming increasingly unpopular. The economist reported earlier this month that the war in Iran is America's least popular conflict since public poll tracking began. And thanks to a virtual Pentagon blackout on information, there's a lot we don't even know about this war in the first place. So yes, this war could be even worse than we know.

To talk more about the Iran War and how we can make sense of it with little to know clear information from the Pentagon, I spoke to Tom Bowman. He's the Pentagon correspondent for NPR. Tom, welcome to what today. Good to be with you. So both Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended former South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham's funeral this afternoon after separate meetings with President Trump, literally back to back. Graham was a huge champion for both Ukraine and Israel and their respective wars. And there's this massive chasm in his absence. Now that Graham has passed, who are Trump and Hegseff listening to when it comes to war?

Well, it's hard to say. I mean, there's still people on the hill, Democrats like Adam Smith of Washington State and others. Mike Rogers, you know, on the armed services, are very supportive of Ukraine. So a number of congressmen, senators are supportive of Ukraine. I think a lot of people are kind of souring on the Iran war. A lot of concerns about, you know, you're depleting the missile supply for defensive missiles. I think there's more support for Ukraine. Of course, President Trump is allowing Ukraine to build Patriot missiles in Ukraine.

That will take quite a while, maybe a couple of years or so, to get. their factory up and running. In the meantime, Ukraine needs Patriot missiles to shoot down the incoming Russian missiles. So they'll have to get more from the United States as well as the European allies. I think to my point, Lindsay Graham wanted to go to war with Iran a lot. Without him, who is that voice who is still saying, let's go send ground troops, let's go after Karg Island? Is there someone who is feeling? that role in Congress right now? You know, not that I have seen. And again, I think people are souring on the Iran war

they wanted to end. So I'm not sure there's a lot of support for continuing this. Of course, Defense Secretary Hague Seth is, was supportive of this. Vice President J.D. Vans was a little more reluctant. Basically, what happened here was, I think President Trump thought it would be easy after the Venezuela mission and getting rid of President Maduro. And then Israeli prime Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, who kind of had a meeting in the situation room at the White House and basically said, hey, we can do this. We'll decapitate the regime. Don't worry about the Strait of Hormuz because Iran will be so weakened. They can't really do anything about it. And in both cases, that turned out to be false. They have a deep bench of leaders that can step in. And clearly they were going to go after the Strait of Hormuz. I was just talking to this retired general, I know, four-star general. And he was just beside himself. He said, listen, we've been studying this for 40 years, and we realized the first thing Iran would do if you went to war with them is close the Strait of Hormuz, which is precisely what they did. But again, I think Netanyahu said, I don't worry about it.

This will be over fast. And here we are almost at the end of July. I think things started in February with no end in sight at this point. Now, you joked before we started that you were covering the Pentagon in exile. And to that point, Pete Hexeth has run a remarkably opaque Pentagon. Under his leadership, the Department of Defense has made the Pentagon press office a classified area. There hasn't been a press briefing in months. May 5th was the last press briefing.

Which is a very long time ago. Also during a war. Right, exactly. So how are you getting information about the war right now when there are no press briefings and no one will tell you anything? I still have contacts within the Pentagon that are willing to talk. I'm reaching out more to Capitol Hill. I'm also reaching out to the embassies here in Washington to find out what they're hearing, what they're talking about. So that's helpful. But you're right. You really need Pentagon briefings. You know, when I covered it during Donald Rumsfeld's time, during the Iraq War and Afghanistan War, sometimes he would have two briefings a week. And they generally would last an hour or so. And he would take almost every question and stay there until the last question, was asked. And even the couple of briefings that the Hegseth has had, first of all, the reporters that have been covering the Pentagon for a long time, we refused to sign this edict, which basically said, you can't solicit information from anyone at the Pentagon. Basically, you can't go to your

sources and say, hey, what's really going on with the depleted munitions, missiles, how many do they have, who's worried about it, and so forth. What the edict said was, you basically have to wait for us to release information, and only then can you report on it, which basically turns us into stenographers and not journalists. And I was at this meeting of military attaches back last fall one month after we all refused to sign this edict and turned our badges in, 60, 70 of us walked out. And this guy walks up to me, introduces himself. He's a Chinese military attache in Washington, spoke perfect English, his second tour in Washington. And we were talking about, you know, where have you been in the country? He said, I've been the 35 states. I said,

I'm from the Boston area. He said, oh, I love Boston. They had this great little conversation. And then he said, hey, tell me about this new Pentagon press policy. And I explained it just like I did to you that, you know, we can't solicit information. We can't go talk to sources, people in the building. We have to wait until they hand us information. And only then can we report on it. He said, oh, just like us. If you also don't aspire to China's journalistic norms, stick around. We'll go back to my conversation with Tom Bowman in a moment. In the meantime, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads.

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Let's get back to my conversation with Tom Bowman. So the messaging that is coming from the Pentagon's official channels, which the Pentagon wants you to just write down, it contradicts a lot of the great reporting that we've seen from reporters like you and a lot of other folks who are still doing this work. And you mentioned about the U.S. munition stockpile, that there have been multiple reports that that stockpile is dwindling between the Iran War and supporting Ukraine and its war against Russia. But in June, Hegzeth told CBS's Margaret Brennan, quote, that is a manufactured story that the media wants to peddle and ultimately our stockpiles are great and they are only getting stronger. So what's your understanding of what's going on here? Well, clearly the missiles have been depleted.

And the UN ambassador, Mike Walts, was on one of the news shows on Sunday, basically saying, yes, we pause attacks on Iran because our missiles are being depleted. He said it himself. So we know that for a fact. We know it from talking to sources on Capitol Hill. There's a concern about it. Now, the Patriot missiles, which are the best missile defense missiles in the world, Raytheon makes 600 of them per year, right? They want to ramp that up to 2,000 per year,

but that'll take a couple of years, two or three years to get to that level. So it is a concern about depleted munitions. It takes a while to manufacture these things. There's no question that this has hurt the missile supply. What's really concerning for a lot of reasons is that the Pentagon has also been KG about reporting casualties in the war. Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon changed the way it categorizes casualties related to the Iran War.

Casualties since July 7th, around when the ceasefire fell apart, are tracked on a website called Oversease Operations, separate from the page on Operation Epic Fury. Now, to my recollection, I've now been through a couple of wars as a person who's following the news and a person reporting on the news. I haven't seen something like this. I mean, going back before I was born since like the Pentagon Papers, this idea of just not reporting information to the public, not giving out this information. Have you seen something like this? Well, as far as killed in action, I have not seen anything like this. And usually within 24, 48 hours, they'll release those who are killed in action. What's curious about what happened recently in the past few days is the four service members who were killed, three in January.

Jordan, and then one in northern Iraq, those numbers were shifted from killed in action in the Iran war to overseas operations. So everyone's scratching their head saying that doesn't make any sense. And I guess what the Pentagon is saying is, well, there was basically a pause in the fighting, so we're not adding them to Iran War killed, which upset at least one of the families. They said, listen, you know, my child should be listed as being. killed in the Iran War because it's still ongoing. Now, I do know covering Afghanistan and Iraq spent a lot of time in both countries during the wars. Sometimes they were little, you know, fudge the figures as far as wounded in action. And, you know, if you were, let's say, in a car that was hit, hit a roadside bomb,

maybe one was killed and you, you know, banged your head and got like a concussion. And it wasn't that bad, you could go back to duty within 72 hours, let's say. They usually would not count that as wounded. So they've been playing with the numbers, really, for quite some time with wounded in action. But again, never with killed in action like we've seen just in the past week. What does trying to fudge those names and numbers of those killed in action, what does that mean for the military? And actually, to that point, what does it mean for the families? Could it change what types of benefits those families could get or the types of honors they might receive? I don't have details under the beneficiaries and what they would lack if their loved one is not

included as killed in action in a war. But, you know, some of the analysts basically say, yeah, some of the benefits, some of the honors they would not receive if it's basically an overseas operation death. I mean, that could be somebody falling off an aircraft carrier, right? in the Caribbean or over in the Arabian Sea. But clearly that's far different from someone who dies in the course of a war. Trump has shown us, shown me over and over, that it seems like he thinks he can do whatever he wants and it'll just all work out. But wars have opponents. And our opponent in this war, Iran takes this war, incredibly seriously, and it will not easily end it.

where do you think Trump's haphazard approach to this war leaves the U.S. in the future? Where will this leave us for years to come? Well, first of all, I mean, we talked about the fleet of munitions. That's part of the problem. I think the Gulf countries who are hit hard by Iran, they've had damage to their facilities, infrastructure, and so forth. Some of the U.S. bases have been hit pretty hard. And that's another thing we're not getting much information on.

You're talking billions of dollars in damage to these bases, you know, in Jordan and Bahrain, in Kuwait. It's going to take a lot of money to rebuild those. And it also might, you know, have a cooling effect on relations with some of these countries. They may say, you know, we're not even sure we want American military in our country if we're going to be threatened by Iran, right? And there's no sense that Iran is going to go away, right? I mean, remember, they talked about regime. change. They talked about people rising up. They talked about basically ending this Islamic regime, and that's clearly not the case. All reports indicate that it's more of a hardline regime than you

saw before the war started, right? And clearly they realize that they can take over the straight of Hormuz or completely restrict the shipping, as we've seen. There is talk between, talks between Oman and Iran now. And apparently one of the latest items is they'll both manage the Strait of Hormuz, and then you can pay voluntary fees for your ship going through either the route of Oman or the route of Iran. So we'll see what comes of that. But the bottom line is the Iranians realize that they can control the straight is no question. Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. Great to be with you, thanks.

That was my conversation with Tom Bowman, Pentagon correspondent for NPR. Before we go, we're just under 100 days out for midterms, which means we'll need all hands on deck to fight for every seat up and down the ballot. It's never been more important to plug in, pound the pavement, and organize where you live.

Votes of America just debuted a new collection of T-shirts featuring nine of the most crucial bed-of-ground states on the 2026 map. Get yours and rip your state today at store. record.com. Let's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Enjoy Fox News host Sean Hannity's deeply felt speech at Lindsay Graham's Memorial Service and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about how, look, you need to hear this for yourself. Lindsay, Mr. President, I'll argue in my mind probably has a heavenly

version of Mar-a-Lago. It may even be a little bigger. he may have a little more gold in the Oval Office in his mansion in heaven. And I wouldn't be surprised if he added one big beautiful ballroom in an arch somewhere on the property. Because he would want to obviously duplicate his dearest friend in life. You, Mr. President. Like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston.

And I don't know which is more unbelievable. that heaven looks like Trump's private club or that Trump considered Lindsay Graham, his dearest friend. What a day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily Forre, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg,

Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Cantor. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.