How Bad Is It?: Trump Strikes Iran and His Base Hits Back
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt for another episode of “How Bad Is It?,” a monthly series that examines the health of American democracy. They discuss whether the President’s recent strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities may threaten his “America first” coalition, how the threat of war may enable him to consolidate more power domestically, and whether Trump’s use of the National Guard to quell protest in Los Angeles is truly undemocratic.
This week’s reading:
- “Zohran Mamdani’s New York City Miracle,” by Eric Lach
- “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Declaration of Independence,” by Ruth Marcus
- “A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts,” by Kyle Chayka
- “Heir Ball: How the Cost of Youth Sports Is Changing the N.B.A.,” by Robin Wright
- “Can Ayatollah Khamenei, and Iran’s Theocracy, Survive This War?,” by Antonia Hitchens
To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, Andrew. |
| 0:07.9 | Hey, Tyler. What's going on? |
| 0:09.6 | Welcome back to episode three of our special series, How Bad Is It? |
| 0:13.8 | Where staff writer Andrew Morantz and I sit down for a health check on the state of our democracy. |
| 0:18.5 | Yeah, I can't tell if we're making things worse by doing this or just, I mean, maybe we should |
| 0:22.4 | stop. |
| 0:23.0 | These episodes definitely don't make me feel any better. |
| 0:25.2 | Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| 0:26.3 | So it's Tuesday morning, and Andrew and I had initially planned on talking about what's |
| 0:31.0 | happening in L.A. with the protests of the mass deportations and Trump sending in the National Guard because I think we both agreed that this was the biggest new story that's happening right now and that it felt undemocratic in a lot of different ways. |
| 0:43.9 | And then we sort of went to war with Iran over the weekend. And then as of this morning, Trump announced that there had been a ceasefire that was also broken immediately after by |
| 0:55.5 | both Israel and Iran. Here is a clip of what Trump said this morning about the status of the |
| 1:01.7 | ceasefire. I'm not happy with Israel. You know, when I say, okay, now you have 12 hours, you don't go |
| 1:07.9 | out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on them. So I'm not happy with them. |
| 1:12.6 | I'm not happy with Iran either. |
| 1:14.6 | But I'm really unhappy if Israel is going out this morning because of one rocket that didn't land, |
| 1:19.6 | that was shot, perhaps by mistake that didn't land, I'm not happy about that. |
| 1:24.6 | You know what? |
| 1:26.6 | We basically have two countries that have been |
| 1:30.2 | fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand |
| 1:35.1 | that? Seems like MAGA people are still pretty pissed and the world is still very much on fire. |
| 1:44.5 | Yeah, I mean, I don't want the world to be on fire, but we have to figure out, like, |
... |
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