Perfect brew of flattery, emotion, and echo chambe

Brandon Weichert:

"Perfect brew" of flattery, emotion, and echo chambers convinced Trump to attack Iran
Story by Tim Hains

04-01-26

Brandon Weichert, host of "NatSec Talk" on Rumble, joins Megyn Kelly on SiriusXM to discuss the messages being pushed through media to President Trump, what leaks before and during the war really tell us, and more.

MEGYN KELLY: It seems like the president may have been misled into thinking this was going to be a snap. And by whom? We obviously know Netanyahu was chief among them. He was probably the biggest cheerleader.
But we know there were a lot of Fox News personalities who got into the president's ear. And then we talked briefly about how the president pushed to Mark Levin's show on Saturday night, where my friend, who I really care for, Marc Thiessen, said the following.


And I can't see a world in which this happens, but Marc is very smart. So you tell me your take on this prediction.

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MARC THIESSEN: I've never seen a war where the Democrats turned against the war on day one and are rooting for defeat... They're all going to have egg on their face, because we're about halfway through this thing. And when this is all over, this is going to go down in history as possibly the greatest military campaign the United States has waged since the American Revolution.

BRANDON WEICHERT, HOST OF "NATSEC TALK" ON RUMBLE: Well, that's to be expected from Don Rumsfeld's former speechwriter, I guess.

This is the same Pollyanna-ish predictions we were hearing in Iraq. I just remind everybody: Iraq was actually supposed to take a few weeks, and then we were supposed to be out.

In fact, I know for a fact the plan for the exit was September '03. The last tranche of U.S. forces were supposed to be pulled out of Baghdad International Airport. And when did we launch it? We launched it in March - this month, actually, ironically this month. I think it was March 19th that we launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, which turned into a quagmire.


And by the way, we're still fighting in Iraq, just so the audience understands. Even though we pulled out, they've ripped open the fighting again between Sunni and Shiite militias. So we are still involved there.

So Marc Thiessen may be a nice guy. I used to see him bouncing around Old Town Alexandria when I lived out there. But ultimately, Marc is not the guy to listen to on anything related to war, with all due respect.

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"Since the American Revolution" seems like a stretch to me.

And I think the problem is President Trump was pushing people to watch that, and clearly President Trump watched that.

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I think it is the echo chamber that Joe Kent talked about in his resignation letter. But I also think we need to not take away agency from the president. I mean, he is the president of the United States.

I think he really was moved by the protesters. I believe that. I think he has heart, and I think that he saw what was happening to the protesters in January and February, and he was like, well, they were slaughtered by the ayatollah.



Now, I don't know to what level - 32,000 sounds a lot. I don't know. But okay, it was clearly bloodshed. It was horrible what was happening. Again, the regime in Iran is not a good regime.

But ultimately, I think that he was moved. And then you throw that in with his relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu. And then you throw it in with the echo chamber of neocons that he only listens to now.

And this is how you have a perfect brew of him believing, after Maduro and what happened in Venezuela and what happened in June with our Iran nuclear policy, he thought he could do it.

I will say General Kaine - and this came out in the press the day before the war started - warned him. Now, why Kaine didn't resign in protest after that is beyond me, and I think that's actually a blight on his record.

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The famous bubble when you work in D.C. - I worked on the Hill for a period of time, and when you work in the White House it's even worse, I'm sure - you get into a bubble, and you're always taking incoming.

So you only start listening to friendly voices.

And I will tell you, I remember being mortified listening to Dan Crenshaw at a private event in 2018. We were at the Capitol Hill Club, and he was gloating about how Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham convinced the president to break his 2016 campaign promise to pull troops out of Syria.

And he was gloating at the table about how - and I said, "Well, how did you even get him to do that?" because I was very cross.

And he said, "Well, I just - we just appealed to his ego. He has the ego the size of Jupiter."

And he said, "We just kept appealing until after two hours in the Yellow Oval Office, we all just got him to break that campaign promise."

It's the same thing with this war.