Um, uh, the, so am I wrong to say that the Iranian regime has won this war, first by surviving, and second by maintaining more or less control over the Strait of Hormuz?

I mean, that is their main leverage point right now, and I think it depends on who you ask who's winning or who's losing.

Certainly you can't say the United States has won the war, as President Trump has said.

And look, the president has become sort of an unreliable narrator to all of this, right? As you mentioned, he's calls these strikes a love tap.

He said it's a, a diversion, a military incursion.

W- we are at war, and I think we need to be clear about that in whatever this state of a ceasefire actually is.

And I think we need to look at what we've actually seen happen rather than what the president says is going to happen, which was a punishing US bombardment.

What, what are, what are we seeing these days?

Yeah, sure.

'Cause I think we're kind of speaking in broad terms about something that was, quite frankly when you look back on it now, like, a very worrying moment in American history, because it showed that when you seed enough doubt in the traditional deliverers of information, even the scientists and the experts upon whom we as a country and a nation and society have relied to get us where we are and healthy today, that it can cause real damage.

I mean, over a million Americans died in that pandemic, and what we saw from the beginning, to Stephanie's point, was journalists following the science and the experts.

If there was a bias in media

John.

You're a comedian.

You're one of the best interviewers in the business.

You're straight journalists.

But what is the current state of play? Where are we going?

I mean, if you look at just the last month, I think it's sort of illustrative of how the last year has gone, which is that whiplash you just showed.

Also, let's underscore the fact that this is still an active war, right? We saw Zelensky out on the front lines today in Kharkiv, a place where I was on the ground last spring, and a place that Russians claim to have actually gained control of last month, and he was shooting selfie videos on the ground today, so very much a lot of land still being contested there.

The US plan that was presented last month was essentially echoing Russian talking points, talking about Ukraine trading territory to help them get to peace, talking about them renouncing the right to join NATO.

When I spoke to the Ukrainian ambassador to the US, Olga Stefani-shyna, earlier this week, she talked about the fact that that language was not final, but that they were happy that this dialogue is now moving around a structured plan of some kind.

So, that's how Ukrainians are looking at this.

New Ukrainian plan now reportedly removes a lot of that language.

"It's just you do your thing, we'll do ours." Am I wrong about this analysis?

Doesn't this very meeting and this relationship, you know, feed into this idea that has MAGA so outraged that the elites operate with a different set of rules and they're lying to the rest of the world?

world?I mean, Stephanie, I think that is exactly it at this moment.

The sell to the MAGA base for a long, long time, from those closest to then-candidate Trump, now President Trump, you're talking about Kash Patel and Dan Bongino and others, was that there was something to see here, there was some cover-up.

That this was powerful people, the elite covering for each other, and when President Trump took office, all of this was to be revealed.

And so, th- when you continue to say, "There is smoke, there's smoke.

There's gotta be fire," and then you show up and say, "Nothing to see here," that raises a lot more questions.

And I think that's where you're starting to see a lot of this distrust and frustration within the MAGA base.

But do you think it's possible that some of those Republicans might actually want to see the Epstein files take him down?

What does that signal to you?

I think it's important to point out the high-profile nos came from someone we expected it from, Rand Paul.

Um, another senator, Susan Collins, who just, as she explained, could not get her head around the cuts to Medicaid and what it would mean for her community in Maine, even with an additional fund that they ended up building for rural healthcare, that additional billions of dollars that ended up going there.

And from Thom Tillis, who announced that he's gonna be retiring, that he's not gonna be running for re-election, and delivered a fiery floor speech in opposition to this bill, basically saying that the President is being misled about the potential cuts here to Medicaid and how many people will be impacted.

So, those are your three no votes right there.

I thought Ryan's reporting pointing out how Lisa Murkowski changed her vote in securing some of those carve-outs for Alaska, that's the key point to focus in on.

But also, another name we're not mentioning here is Senator Ron Johnson, who had for weeks led the opposition to this bill, largely as a self-proclaimed fiscal hawk and ended up changing his mind and his vote in the end as well, because he said he got commitments from the President about returning to some federal spending levels at pre-pandemic levels.

What do you think?

If the United States would strike Iran, how does that change this volatile situation? It's got to be a game changer.

changer.I mean, it would be a significant change, both as Geoff has laid out in how this president approaches the rest of the world and America's role in it, right? As he pointed out, this is a man who ran on not becoming further entangled in anything overseas, an America first, a more of an isolationist approach.

But it would also be an incredible game changer for the entire region, not just for Iran.

You have to remember, you have a weakened regime that's already in place there in Iran, an aged 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei in charge, who's already faced a lot of domestic pressures over the years from the internal population.

And I want to point out, the Iranian people here are caught in the middle of all of this, neither supporting their oppressive or repressive regime, but also now the subjects of the bombardment from th- the Israeli airstrikes.

But American intervention at this point could be sort of a range of options.

You've already got some intelligence support going on.

Now, a story like this ends up being, uh, I mean, in a crazy way, a win for polit- all the politicians involved, right? Lander gets the headline he wants, Trump gets the headline he wants, but what about the immigrant that he was actually trying to help today who was doing the right thing legally attending an immigration hearing?