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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Thursday, June 26th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that is standing up and saying, no, I do not think we need a sequel to the Social Network, we’re good. [music break] On today’s show, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, signs an agreement with the Council of Europe to create a special tribunal to try Russian officials for crimes against Ukraine. And Attorney General Pam Bondi tells lawmakers she had absolutely no idea federal agents were wearing masks during immigration raids. None, whatsoever! She is shocked. Shocked to hear it, folks. But let’s start with Iran, Israel, and the United States. As of our recording on Wednesday evening, Pacific Time. The ceasefire between Iran and Israel is holding. At a NATO conference in the Netherlands, President Donald Trump said that the United States would be holding talks with Iran sometime next week, though he added that he didn’t think an agreement was actually necessary. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] The way I look at it, they fought, the war’s done, and you know I could get a statement that they’re not going to go nuclear, we’re probably going to ask for that, but that they’re not going to be doing it. But they’re going to be not doing it anyway. They’ve had it. They’ve had it. 

Jane Coaston: And besides, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argued like the Fox News host he was ten minutes ago, the Iranian nuclear program has been, quote, “obliterated.” 

[clip of Pete Hegseth] So if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordow, you better get a big shovel and go really deep because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated. And somebody, somewhere is trying to leak something to say, oh, with low confidence, we think maybe it’s moderate. Those that dropped the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded. And you know who else knows? Iran. 

Jane Coaston: Now, despite Hegseth’s sudden enthusiasm for shovels, it is not clear that the Iranian nuclear program has been, quote, “obliterated.” As we mentioned on the show Wednesday, multiple outlets have reported on a preliminary analysis from the Defense Intelligence Agency. It showed Iran’s nuclear capacity may not have been hit as hard as the Trump administration keeps saying, and that it’s only been set back a few months. Of course, the administration responded to this claim in the calm, measured style we have all come to expect from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. 

[clip of Karoline Leavitt] No other president in history could have ever dreamed of such a success, and that’s exactly why the fake news media is now trying to demean and undermine the president. And we’ve seen this playbook be run before. You have hostile actors within the intelligence community who lick, illegally leak bits and pieces of an intelligence assessment to push a fake news narrative. And that’s what the CNN story was yesterday. And it’s not a coincidence that it was written by the exact same CNN reporter who wrote the original story falsely alleging that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. 

Jane Coaston: Alright, Caroline, stop yelling. The administration says it’s going to investigate the leak, and Axios reports it also plans to stop sharing information with Congress to avoid more leaks, which doesn’t make me feel more inclined to believe the Trump administration. Kind of the opposite? Anyway, what’s more interesting to me than the Trump Administration’s efforts to scream their way into higher approval ratings has been the response from the broader Magasphere. Before the June 21st strikes, there were a number of right-wing voices speaking out against strikes on Iran. They echoed a broader sentiment that I’ve been hearing for about a decade now, that Donald Trump is an anti-war isolationist. Remember his insistence that he opposed the Iraq War? He didn’t, but it was notable that being against a war that had 93% support from Republicans in 2003 proved to be actually pretty effective. And yet, now both the Trump administration and most of his biggest and loudest supporters are cheerleading his intervention in yet another conflict in the Middle East. So I wanted to talk to a conservative who has been outspoken in his opposition to war with Iran. Sohrab Ahmari is the U.S. Editor for UnHerd, a British news and opinion outlet. We talked on Wednesday afternoon. Sohrab, welcome to What a Day. 

Sohrab Ahmari: Jane, thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: What’s your impression of the rights reaction in the last few days to Trump’s decision to strike Iran? Because to me, it felt real 2003, like invasion of Iraq. And now I wouldn’t say the Trump administration has quite rolled out the proverbial mission accomplished banner, like the Bush administration literally did a few weeks after the invasion, but it certainly feels like they were trying to, what’s your take? 

Sohrab Ahmari: Yeah, I think there are some big differences with 2003. Um. In 2003, for the most part, the entire media establishment, left and right, um was more or less on board with the invasion of Iraq. What’s remarkable about um this time around in 2025 is that you had a kind of rebellion of the Magasphere or the magaworld um against against the United States directly getting involved. And for the most part, the dissidents, not just like the kind of foreign policy writers and intellectual people like myself, but, you know, the MAGA celebrities, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Senator Hawley, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the magazine The Federalist. These were very vocal, and as time went on, they became more so. They became more strident in opposing the march to a direct U.S. entry. Ultimately, I think they failed to win the factional battle within the right over that, but it still was quite remarkable. It revealed real fissures on the right that I don’t think will soon be papered over. But, you know, at the end of the day, like the boomer media power um won out. 

Jane Coaston: So the general consensus seems to be that the big winner in all of this is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that Iran is the unquestionable loser. But you wrote a piece laying out why that may not be true. Can you walk us through your argument? 

Sohrab Ahmari: Yeah, basically I think from an Iranian point of view, you can’t say they won. I mean, obviously there are lots of military and civilian infrastructure assets were blown up. Lots of the leadership was killed in the early hours of the Israeli operation. I think they didn’t lose and that’s significant enough. The Iranian regime’s mentality, I think are these three things we just know from its history. Number one is regime preservation. They endured. They withstood an attack by two nuclear powers. No one helped them, whereas much of the West helped Israel materially, and in the case of the US, by directly getting involved, and they stood. Number two would be nuclear continuity. There’s at least some consensus among various expert agencies and NGOs and so on that like you can’t kill know-how, and the Iranians very likely moved much of their fissile material. And now, because diplomacy has been short-circuited, like, we don’t know what they’re going to do with them. Um. And number three is domestic re-consolidation. You know for the most part, the people stood with the regime and and there was no uprising. There’s no like restoration of the monarchy or whatever. And that’s pretty important to them as well. 

Jane Coaston: What gets me is that Trump ran on what was perceived to be a very isolationist America first platform. And this is not the first time I’ll never forget that New York Times headline, Donald the dove, Hillary the hawk. But I don’t think that that was ever exactly true. I think Trump loves winning and his major objection to say, you know, the later years of the war in Iraq was not the entrance into the war in the first place, it’s that we weren’t obviously winning. So what does his decision to strike Iran tell us about the divide between the Trump foreign policy doctrine in theory versus in practice?

Sohrab Ahmari: Well, I mean, I once among the various times I interviewed Vice President J.D. Vance was one it was like two months before he was tapped to be um Trump’s running mate, and he described Trump’s foreign policy as Jacksonian, you know, inspired by Andrew Jackson, and it’s this kind of middle ground between isolationism and full restraint on one hand, and the kind of idealistic neoconservatism on the other. And the idea, as Vance put it to me then, was like, we don’t throw punches. We don’t get into things unless someone punches at us. And then in that case, then we will just like fucking break them is the way he put it. Um. So I think on a, as a Trump doctrine matter, it’s not a grave violation of the kind of mentality that he brings to foreign policy. The question is just whether it was effective and to what extent it was forced on him by the Israelis running circles around him rather than something that he really set out to do from the beginning. 

Jane Coaston: But what does it say that the Israelis were able to force him into this point in the first place? That’s not very America first if another country can strike Iran and then be like, we need help, please help. 

Sohrab Ahmari: Yeah, I mean, and that’s the thing that I think in the long term really cast doubt on the future shape of the U.S.-Israel relationship. I just think that, you know, if you look at what’s happening on the Democratic side with foreign policy and where the energy is, and then you look at the young professionals coming up on the Republican side, I think the Israelis really are facing a generational vice grip, where it was really only, let’s say, Americans over 50 who were willing to just indulge Israeli maximalism, in [?] because some cases just like having a sense of total identification with a Jewish state where they don’t see any difference between their interests sometimes. And I bet you there are lots of people who are now embittered by this and determined to not see a repeat. 

Jane Coaston: But what does that say about the MAGA movement more broadly? Because we’re seeing polls come out. And let’s let’s keep in mind that polling on this kind of incident is always really wiggly because you’ll see polling saying that Americans don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, but also Americans in general were broadly opposed to these strikes. But shocker, a majority of Republicans support them. Is that kind of an age difference? Is that a, you know, we’ve always been kind of worried about Iran since 1979. What’s going on there? 

Sohrab Ahmari: I would say all of the above. I think partly it’s the age factor, it’s like the boomer effect one. It is partly that like, look, a lot, especially older people will remember the fact that the Iranian regime was like founded in anti-Americanism. And then another one, which is kind of painful is just this question of like, what is America first or what is MAGA? And it seems to me what the, like the deep MAGA voters are signaling is that there really is no principled answer to that, that it’s a floating signifier. And basically Trump gets to define and redefine it at will and the voters will be like, yeah, of course that was always America first. You know and then he might shift gears and they’ll just kind of go along with him. That’s his magnetic effect. I don’t think his would be successors like JD or others have the ability to like treat MAGA in such a free floating way. 

Jane Coaston: Trump sometimes seems almost immune to consequences or feeling the weight of what might be consequences. And the potential consequences of this intervention in Iran are enormous, as you and I both know. In your mind, what are the odds that his intervention here does play out exactly the way he wanted it? Because right now, that doesn’t seem totally out of the question. 

Sohrab Ahmari: You know, it might. But first of all, that goes back to the question you raised earlier about those reports that are coming out saying that like, and I had heard, like I said, from Iranian state TV, I was watching the whole time where they said, we had emptied out Fordow, we removed all the fissile material. And so you have a lot of enriched uranium, not all of it maybe, but part of it, part of the stockpile, that’s like now been spirited away somewhere else in Iran and is maybe gonna be much harder to inspect and enforce. Than it would have been if we’d stuck to the diplomatic track where you have, for example, U.S. inspectors being involved. So that’s one. The second one that I think is very disturbing for me is the fact that the US gave the impression that it uses diplomacy, it’s not even bad faith diplomacy or tough diplomacy, is the use of diplomacy as a kinetic ploy. Like we’re going to pretend like we’re going talk to you, we’re gonna give you two weeks, and then we’re gonna surprise you with various attacks, whether it’s Israeli or US. Well, America first, or lots of Americans want to make peace in other areas, or at least try to make deals, like Russia, Ukraine, and other interlocutors of the United States. So they’re adversaries, or rivals, get this message that the US uses diplomacy as just like another military ploy to trick you. That’s a big problem. And then lastly, I think the one that’s really also again disturbing is if I were like Turkey and any number of other like middle powers so-called, I watch that and I think, well, there’s no way to be really sovereign unless I have nuclear weapons. So I’m going to race to do it. But I’m going to be smarter than the Iranian mullahs. I’m not gonna chant death to this and death to that. I’m just gonna quietly nuclearize. And that’s really bad for the non-proliferation regime. 

Jane Coaston: Sohrab, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. 

Sohrab Ahmari: My pleasure, thank you. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Sohrab Ahmari, U.S. editor for the British news and opinion outlet UnHerd. We’ll link to his work on our show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Brad Lander] We cannot afford internecine wars amongst Democrats where we’re fighting each other. It’s great to have experiments to run primaries to see what excites people and push forward. And then remember, ultimately it is, we are in an existential crisis of our democracy and our enemy is Donald Trump and not each other. 

Jane Coaston: That was New York City Comptroller and candidate for mayor Brad Lander talking to What a Day newsletter writer Matt Berg Wednesday morning. Zohran Mamdani stunned New Yorkers by coming away from the Democratic primary with a decisive victory Tuesday over former New York Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral race. Landers and Mamdani cross endorsed each other in the contest. Cuomo conceded the election to Mamdani around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night, just about 90 minutes after polls closed. Cuomo said, quote, “tonight was not our night,” and went on to praise Mamdani’s inspirational campaign. Even though Mamdiani is now the presumptive Democratic nominee, there’s still a lot of room for Democratic infighting between now and November. On Wednesday, Cuomo said he was still considering whether to run against Mamdani again in the general election. In May, Cuomo formed his own political party, the Fight and Deliver Party, so that he could run for mayor both as a Democratic candidate in the primary, and also as an independent in the General, if necessary. If Cuomo does decide to go that route, he’ll appear on the ballot alongside Mamdani and current New York City mayor Democrat Eric Adams. In April, Adams announced that he’d be running for re-election as an independent. 

[clip of unnamed journalist] I think you just had a meeting with President Zelensky. Did you discuss any ceasefire in this Russo-Ukrainian war? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] No, no, I just I wanted to know how he’s doing. It was very nice, actually. We had little rough times. He was couldn’t have been nicer. I think he’d like to see an end to this, I do. 

Jane Coaston: On Wednesday, President Trump held a press conference at the conclusion of the NATO summit in the Netherlands. After complimenting the Netherlands’ beautiful trees and attractive royal family, Trump spoke warmly of his meeting earlier that day with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. While Trump said the pair didn’t explicitly discuss a ceasefire, he said he would speak to Putin to, quote, “see if we can get it ended.” Trump also referred to Putin as the more difficult party in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Wild! In a post to Twitter after the meeting, Zelensky thanked Trump, but contradicted him slightly by saying they had discussed a ceasefire during their conversation. Zelensky also delivered a speech before the Council of Europe for the first time Wednesday. 

[clip of Volodymyr Zelensky] Your clear political positions, calling Russia’s actions a crime of aggression, supporting a just end to the war, and rejecting any attempt to legitimize the Russian occupation of our Ukrainian territories have helped shape the political response of all of Europe. 

Jane Coaston: Just before his remarks, Zelensky signed an agreement with the Council of Europe to create a special tribunal to try Russian officials for crimes against Ukraine. Russia struck Ukraine for nearly two straight days starting on Monday. The attacks killed dozens of civilians, including a five-year-old boy and an 11-year old girl. Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday to talk about the Justice Department’s fiscal 2026 budget request. During the hearing, Bondi expressed what some would call blind ignorance when asked about federal officers wearing masks while trying to detain suspected immigrants. Here’s part of the exchange between Bondi and Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan. 

[clip of Senator Gary Peters] My question for you, Attorney General Bondi, is given the number of DOJ employees currently conducting immigration enforcement activities in support of DHS, how are you going to ensure that the safety of the public and the officers, if they continue to not follow required protocol to identify themselves as law enforcement? 

[clip of Attorney General Pam Bondi] And senator Peters that’s the first time that issue has has come to me about them cover your saying that law enforcement officers when they cover their faces? 

[clip of Senator Gary Peters] Right. 

[clip of Attorney General Pam Bondi] I do know they are being doxxed as you said um they’re being threatened their families are being threatened you know it’s it’s– 

Jane Coaston: But Peters wasn’t buying it. He pressed on. 

[clip of Senator Gary Peters] People think, here’s a person coming up to me, not identified, covering themselves. They’re kidnapping. They’ll probably fight back. That endangers the officer as well. And that’s a serious situation. People need to know that they’re dealing with a federal law enforcement official. 

[clip of Attorney General Pam Bondi] Senator, I would be happy to look at that issue with you and talk to all of our partner law enforcement agencies. But I can assure you that if they’re covering their faces now, it’s to protect themselves. But they also want to protect all citizens. And that’s something we can work together on. 

Jane Coaston: Bull shit lady. Aside from the easily accessible, widespread video evidence of federal officers covering their faces, top immigration officials have literally defended the practice. Need I remind you, Attorney General, that just earlier this month, acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons said, quote, “I am sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line and their family on the line because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is.” Maybe he and Pam Bondi should meet sometime. On Tuesday, a court in Costa Rica ordered the release of foreign migrants being held in a shelter there after they were deported by the United States. That’s according to the resolution seen by Agence France-Presse. In February, Costa Rica accepted some 200 U.S. deportees from countries including China, India, and Nepal. It was part of an effort by the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their homeland. In April, Costa Rico’s immigration director said it would grant dozens of the migrants a pathway to move about freely. The New York Times reports that as of this week, a slew of the deportees sent to Costa Rica had returned to their countries of origin. Earlier in the year, an appeal was filed on behalf of the migrants deported to Costa Rica. The court in Costa Rica partially accepted the appeal Tuesday and gave officials 15 days to process the immigration status of the deportees, as well as their release. The resolution came a day before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem traveled to Costa Rica. She posted on Twitter Wednesday about her visit to a detention facility, quote, “used by the Costa Rican immigration police to house and process criminal illegal aliens, including terrorists.” Sure. And that’s the news. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, shout out to New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, who had to be hospitalized after a workout due to dehydration from DC’s heatwave and still made it right back to work, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how dehydration in high heat can happen in just two hours and can have serious and potentially deadly health effects like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and stay hydrated. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Sean Ali, Tyler Hill, and Laura Newcomb. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. 

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