Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast.

I'm your host Tim Miller.

Happy Memorial Day.

We've got an abbreviated edition of our usual Monday podcast for, you know, those of you on long road trips with your family and you want to disassociate and just hang out with us instead or people that just want to celebrate the holiday by paying attention to our insane news cycle.

And since it's Monday, I'm here with Bill Crystal.

How you doing, Bill?

Fine. How are you, Tim? I'm doing well. I'm doing well, all things considered. Why don't we just

get to it here? A lot of updates on the state of play with regards to Iran since we were last

together on Friday. On Saturday, Trump announced that we're basically on the cusp of a deal.

A deal is essentially done 95% there, a lot of Ballyhoo, a lot of back patting among Trump himself.

But his allies, the pro-war allies, were pretty horrified by the rumors coming out about the deal.

And so since then,

things have started to unwind a little bit. On Sunday, there's a massive spin effort to push that

there would be dust for dollars. There'd be no dollars without nuclear dust. They were calling

all their allies, being sure they knew that, and that there'd be no toll on the straight. And this

morning, Monday, Iran is saying that they

aren't charging a toll on the straight, but they are charging an environmental protection fee,

which shows that the Iranians have learned a lot from the liberal bureaucratic nomenclature

of the West. So anyway, that's the state of play where we're at now. Bill, what's your sense of things? Trump desperately wants a deal. The Iranians know that and are twisting the knife a little, but also, I think, as you can see, with the environmental fee thing, giving him enough cover so that Trump will end up with a deal, it'll be murky, more even than these deals often are.

And we'll see what really happens in terms of the nuclear material, in terms of opening the straight. But I think we're heading towards, I mean, we've been heading towards the deal for a while. I think some of us have thought it was going to happen for a long, long time. Trump has basically announced he wants a deal. I mean, the degree to which he can bluster a little bit and put up memes of, I don't know, us bombing Iran or decimating places or Iran with an American flag.

But at the end of the day, he wants out.

And I guess he'll get out.

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