June 17, 2025: Trump’s Middle East dilemma

The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO

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🗓️ 17 June 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

President Donald Trump is unexpectedly back in Washington today, cutting his G7 trip short amid a spiraling situation with Iran. Yesterday, Trump made an ominous Truth Social post suggesting “everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran” — words that immediately provoked a fiery response from some of his usual supporters, who see the threat of such foreign interventionism as a betrayal of his “America first” ethos. Now, he faces one of the biggest dilemmas of his presidency: Should the U.S. back Israel in attacking Iran? And if so, to what extent? The implications are enormous — for the U.S., for the world and for Trump’s political project. Chief Playbook correspondent Dasha Burns and author Jack Blanchard talk it all, what they’re hearing and what to expect in the days ahead.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Presented by BP.
0:08.6	Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard.
0:10.6	And I'm Dasha Burns.
0:11.8	It is Tuesday, June 17th.
0:13.9	And this is the Playbook podcast.
0:16.0	Good morning, Dasha.
0:17.1	Good morning.
0:18.4	There is a lot going on.
0:20.1	Everyone knows what the big story is today. President
0:22.5	Donald Trump is not at the G7 summit. He is back in Washington, D.C., cutting short his trip to the G7
0:28.5	because he needs to engage with the conflicts happening in the Middle East, and we are going to
0:33.1	spend this podcast talking about that. A couple of other things just to flag on your radar before we get
0:38.1	into that. Senators are meeting today for a classified security briefing following the assassinations
0:43.3	in Minnesota at the weekend. That's obviously a huge deal on the Hill. Still lots of conversations
0:47.1	about those killings, obviously on many Congress people's mind for obvious reasons. Third thing
0:53.1	happening on the Hill today, more
0:54.6	meetings about the reconciliation bill. We saw a load of new details of the Senate GOPs tax plans
0:59.4	last night and we're likely to see much more debates about that today. But let's talk about
1:04.2	the big story, Dasher, an absolute jaw-dropper out of the G7 last night. The meetings
1:09.1	seemed to be going pretty normally for Trump. He signed a trade deal or sort of a trade deal with the UK and he spouted off about this and spouted off about that. And then suddenly he's coming home. This was obviously a conversation heading into the G7. We didn't know just how critical this moment was going to be. What I'm hearing from my sources in the White House is that right now, I mean, we've been trying to figure out, I think, over the last several days, who were the major influential voices in the room is sort of one perspective here, winning out, who was trying to coax him to do what? It seems from what I'm hearing that he really is hearing from all of the different factions right now.
1:44.7	He's talking to military leaders. He's talking to folks in Intel. He's really considering all of
1:49.8	the options at the moment. And the White House, the source that I'm talking to are pointing to what
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