June 26, 2025: What’s the truth about the Iran strike?

The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO

News, Daily News, Politics, Government

3.9 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2025

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Freshly back from the NATO Summit, President Donald Trump’s attention is now focused squarely on one thing: selling the Iran strike as an unmitigated success — regardless of what intelligence assessments say. Today the administration will focus on trying to shift the narrative — casting questions about the efficacy of the strikes as a slap in the face of American military pilots, and blaming Congress for the leaked intelligence reports that contradict Trump’s claims. POLITICO White House reporter Megan Messerly joins Playbook author Jack Blanchard to walk through what to watch. Plus, the Democratic Party is only beginning to reckon with outsider candidate Zohran Mamdani’s primary election upset in NYC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	presented by BP.
0:08.3	Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard.
0:10.3	And I'm Megan Messerly.
0:11.8	It's Thursday, June 26th.
0:13.8	And this is the Playbook podcast.
0:15.9	Megan, you've done the whole week with me.
0:17.6	Thank you so much.
0:18.6	Of course.
0:19.3	It's been so wonderful being here with you.
0:19.9	It's been a real treat. We've been having far more fun than Dasher who's been swanning around the Netherlands with the president. Yeah. I mean, we've just been thriving in this heat here, you know, sweltering in swampy D.C. Swampy D.C. and sweltering in the heat of news as well. It's been incredibly newsy month, frankly, hasn't it? It really has.
0:21.0	Absolutely. Swampy, D.C. And sweltering in the heat of news as well. It's been an incredibly newsy month, frankly, hasn't it?
0:40.2	It really has. Absolutely crazy. Things should be a little bit calmer today. He says, fingers crossed, can't believe I've dared say that. Never say that. You will jinx it, Jack.
0:49.4	Totally. The first thing we're watching driving the day today, President Donald Trump is back in D.C. this morning after his quick jaunt to the NATO summit at the Hague, but he is going to continue banging the drum about his strikes on Iran from the weekend and making clear that he believes that whole thing was a triumph. And we're going to see a press conference this morning with the Secretary of Defense, Pete Higgsath and various people from the military who are going to come out at 8 o'clock this morning and make the case. So Megan, you and I should get into all of that in just a minute as the sort of main theme that I think we'll be driving the day. A couple of other things to flag and that we can just discuss briefly before we get into that.
1:28.6	The second one, of course, is the fallout from Tuesday night.
1:31.3	It's amazing New York City Democratic mayoral primary when the young socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdami swept aside the favorite, Andrew Cuomo.
1:42.1	I mean, really trounced him, frankly, in that primary and is now
1:45.7	very much the favourite to be the next mayor of New York City.
1:49.7	24 hours later, it feels like the Republican Party are sort of flexing their muscles now and
1:56.8	sort of clicking their fingers and thinking that this is a real opportunity for us.
2:00.8	Is that how you see it? They are. I think they're sort of saliv fingers and thinking that this is a real opportunity for us. Is that how you see it?
2:01.9	They are.
2:02.5	I think they're sort of salivating over this opportunity.
	...

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