00:00We're going to talk now about Donald Trump's comments that I mentioned at the top there and U.S. involvement or not in this war.
00:06Ketavan Gordistani, our international affairs editor, is with me here on set.
00:10Ketavan, we saw yesterday, didn't we, Donald Trump left, of course, that G7 summit earlier.
00:15But is he any closer to deciding whether the U.S. is really going to get involved in this or not?
00:20Well, at least they haven't shared with the public what that decision would be if there is a decision.
00:25But clearly, there's a lot of weighing of options going on.
00:30When he came back to the White House, he had this meeting with his national security team in the Situation Room.
00:36And the reporting is that during that meeting, he was presented with several different types of options for possible U.S. involvement.
00:45And the idea and the message that is coming out from the White House through reporting and through some of the comments by officials is that Donald Trump has gone from trying to give diplomacy a chance to gradually, increasingly tending towards the possibility of intervening.
01:09That started, of course, with these posts.
01:11These are the only comments that we have from Donald Trump about where he stands.
01:17The first one was, we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.
01:23The White House confirming that the we that he was using there was, yes, the United States, not Israel, even though they didn't give details as to what that actually meant.
01:34Did they mean that there were U.S. planes in the skies of Tehran or simply sort of intelligence or logistics involvement there?
01:44Then there was the second post where Donald Trump said that we know where the so-called supreme leader is hiding,
01:52though he insisted that the U.S. was not going to take out the supreme leader of Iran, at least for now, he said, though he added, our patience is wearing thin.
02:04And that's really where we believe that the White House is standing right now, which is seriously considering a U.S. involvement.
02:12But at least for now, having not made that final decision, there was a final post in all caps towards unconditional surrender.
02:23You add to that the fact that there has been all this repositioning of U.S. forces, not only in the Mediterranean,
02:31but in the broader Middle East with aircraft carriers, refueling tankers.
02:37All of that, yes, can be a defensive posture, but it can also be to go along with those options that he was given
02:46so that if he does make the decision, the positioning is already there to sort of act on the decision of the U.S. president.
02:55Kereman, one of the things that I'm sure he's considering as well is what his supporters are thinking about this,
03:00because there is something of a fight, isn't there, between the MAGA supporters and the Hawks in the U.S.?
03:04Absolutely. There is really a sort of split in Donald Trump's coalition.
03:10And I think that Charlie Kirk, who's a MAGA personality with a huge following online, put it pretty simply.
03:18He said, no issue currently divides the right as much as a foreign policy,
03:23because you have the MAGA wing that is very much isolationist,
03:27and you have the sort of old school neocons, the Hawks,
03:32that are much more on the side of joining Israel and taking on Iran directly.
03:41And Charlie Kirk, with a lot of other personalities in the MAGA world,
03:47reminded people and possibly Donald Trump that he was elected to end U.S. involvement abroad.
03:56He was elected on the so-called No New Wars messaging,
04:00and that's a message that's been repeated by the likes of Steve Bannon, the likes of Tucker Carlson,
04:06all arguing that Donald Trump promised his supporters that he would not get the U.S. involved in foreign affairs.
04:16Marjorie Taylor Greene coming to the defense of Tucker Carlson, who was attacked by Donald Trump for criticizing him.
04:22She said that she had core beliefs with Tucker Carlson that foreign wars, intervention, regime change put America last.
04:32That's obviously not what the Hawks think.
04:34They believe that this is a golden opportunity to finish the job, take out the nuclear program of Iran,
04:41possibly even bring about a regime change, which, of course, MAGA is totally opposed to.
04:47And you're really seeing for the first time this division coming out in public.
04:52And the other thing, of course, that Donald Trump may well be considering is the assessments of the damage
04:57that's already been done to Iran's nuclear infrastructure and how simple it would be to go further.
05:03Yes, we already have a little bit of a sort of early assessment from the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency,
05:12that said that the initial Israeli strikes did cause quite a lot of damage on the Natanz enrichment facility,
05:22not just superficially at the top, but also what is happening underground.
05:28And Benjamin Netanyahu said that they had managed to turn back the time on sort of Iran's nuclear program.
05:38But so far, Israel has barely been able to sort of damage anything around the Fordow facility,
05:48which is, of course, the one that is buried deep under a mountain.
05:52And that is where the U.S. involvement comes into play.
05:55That is why Israel really wants and needs the United States to get involved,
06:01because to wipe out the Fordow facility, that would require something that only the Americans have,
06:08that 30,000-pound bunker-busting bomb and the aircraft that can actually carry and drop that bomb.
06:18And that can only happen if the U.S. actually decides to get involved alongside Israel.
