Why Did Trump Just Threaten Oman?

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Iran wants control of the Strait of Hormuz. Would you accept a short-term deal that allows Iran and Oman to control the strait? And would they have to open it immediately, or would you be open to that happening over a period of time?

[00:00:11]>> No, the strait's going to be open to everybody. It's uh And who would control it? It's international waters. Nobody's going to control it. We're going to watch over it. We'll watch over it, but nobody's going to control it. This part of the negotiation that we have, they would like to control it. Nobody's going to control it. It's international waters, and uh Oman will behave just like everybody else. So, we'll have to blow them up.

[00:00:33]Okay, I just I'm not an expert on military anything related to the military. So, I want to just put that on the table and let everyone know I'm ignorant of this.

[00:00:43]But, that statement, first of all, the threat toward Oman, I personally think is totally unhinged. But, also the statement overall, I find to be a little bit unhinged because it's one thing to make a claim like that when you have the military capability to force open the Strait of Hormuz. But, my read of this is that we do not have the military capacity to do that. Maybe I'm incorrect. Can you give us some, you know, clarity on it?

[00:01:09]If there was a military solution, President Trump would say to Secretary Hegseth, "Make it so." And it would be done. Although, I think President Trump understands that any tactical victory we have would be very short-lived.

[00:01:19]Otherwise, again, he would he would just execute it. Look, the the Iranians don't need much in terms of technology to be able to really hamper the commerce on the Strait of Hormuz. We've known this now for for decades. So, when when President Trump I I had to go back and listen to that clip several times cuz I didn't know if he misspoke, and and clearly he didn't. Um This kind of actually goes back to what we were just talking about. When I hear President Trump speak like that, I think it's very much out of character. Uh Trump can be hyperbolic, but usually it's kind of in a jokey, over-the-top kind of trolly way. When it comes to diplomacy and and high-level negotiations, I I don't I haven't heard him use talk like this with you know a partner country or a friendly country even a country that he respects. I know he respects the the Omanis. I've never heard that before. I've heard him be very very measured before. I've heard him even chastise aids before for using harsh language with you know a potential trade partner.

[00:02:14]So I kind of read that as Trump being very frustrated. He's frustrated with a lot of the people who are noticing that he's out of really good options and who are saying the things that we're saying like Mr. President why don't you just leave and for some reason he can't leave and now he's lashing out at many people who used to support him myself included.

[00:02:33]I understand why he lashed out at me because of the way I left the administration. So I understand that. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, there's all these folks Tucker Carlson, there's all these people who were core Trump supporters now who are saying Mr. President what the hell are you doing and he's lashed out at them.

[00:02:48]Maybe the Omanis have said something to him behind closed doors. They they more than likely have because the Omanis for a very long time they've been like the Switzerland the Geneva almost of the Middle East and they've helped us out a lot with back channel diplomacy. So when he says that I don't think it's necessary it does come across as being very unhinged but I think he's just frustrated with the situation. Yeah, I mean I would be frustrated with the situation as well but you know I would maybe avoid sidelining DNI Gabbard who has stepped down from her position when she did the threat assessment and said that Iran is not building nuclear weapons is not a threat to the United States and I would have maybe considered that Israel does have completely different objectives than the United States. And you know back to your point about how the US demands absolutely no uranium enrichment by the Iranians.

[00:03:42]I mean every country has the right to enrich uranium up to like 3.5% for energy purposes and you know apparently there are medical purposes as well. You need enriched uranium to reach 90% in order to build a nuclear weapon. Um, and I'm not saying this just to insult Trump because I'm genuinely curious. Do you think that he knows that? And do you think there's maybe a possibility that Trump would if someone spoke to him about this? Like, do you think that he would maybe accept Iran being able to enrich uranium up to 3.5%?

[00:04:17]I don't think President Trump at the beginning of the administration he didn't really care about the enrichment per se.

[00:04:23]Um, I don't think he was a, you know, a technical expert on levels of enrichment. He was dead set and he says this all the time, Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. And the reason why the Trump was at the negotiating table with the Iranians on two separate occasions and I believe on the cusp of getting a deal was because President Trump said, Iran can never have a nuclear weapon and the Ayatollah said, well, good news, I've had a fatwa, a prohibition on developing a nuclear weapon that's been in place since 2003. And President Trump asked us early on in the administration, why doesn't Iran have a nuclear weapon?

[00:04:54]And we pointed out the fatwa and we said, hey, a lot of people won't trust a fatwa cuz it's like this, you know, Shia religious decree and we have no reason to trust it other than the fact that it's actually worked. And Iran could have had a nuclear weapon long before President Trump was even in his first administration if they they wanted to.

[00:05:10]But their strategy was really pragmatic.

[00:05:12]They didn't want to get the Gaddafi treatment by giving up everything, giving up the ability to enrich uranium.

[00:05:17]They didn't want to get the Saddam treatment by like rushing towards a nuclear weapon or making it look like kind of hinting that they had a nuclear weapon. So they kind of had this this middle version where they could have a nuclear weapon but they weren't going to and enriching uranium was a key part of that. That was well understood and I believe President Trump understood it.

[00:05:34]If you even go back to some of the original messaging that Steve Whitcomb was using when he would do media appearances, he was talking about him and the Iranians sitting down and negotiating, you know, levels of enrichment, how the enrichment would be monitored by the international community. They were working out the technical details. And this what This is why I believe the Israelis came in with their influence operation in a full court press to move the red line away from Iran can never have a nuclear weapon to Iran can't enrich. The way they're able to to launder that talking point into becoming US policy backed us into this corner. And every time you see Trump come out and say Iran can't can't have a nuclear weapon, it's always cleaned up later on about enrichment.

[00:06:13]And then they push him and he's painted back into this corner. So, I think if we could just get the enrichment issue, you know, out of the way, we would move on past that and we'd be much closer to actually making a deal. Yes, I I look, I totally agree with you on that. I Great point about the cleaning up his language after the fact to no enriched uranium.

[00:06:33]And you know, when you go to the Iranian side and what they're demanding, they have some demands that might be huge red lines for the United States. Like for instance, Iran wants all, you know, US military out of the region. And they did destroy our bases in Gulf countries. And so, is that something that you think the Trump administration would be open to?

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[00:08:07]I think the gut reaction is to say, "We'll never back down. We're going to keep our bases here, gosh darn it." But, a lot of us have been advocating for a very long time that our bases in these regions, they're actually more of a strategic liability than they are an asset. And this last iteration of conflict with Iran really proved that.

[00:08:24]Our our bases, we had to evacuate. We had to have our guys go and scatter out to local hotels. We took major damage at at CENTCOM headquarters. We're always going to need some degree of, you know, we call it, you know, basing and overflight and, you know, the ability to use some airfields, the ability to use ports. We're always going to you need that, but the ability to have a large military presence on Iran's borders, I I believe actually plays to our enemy, plays to Iran's strengths cuz if they can reach out and touch us with their weapon systems, then it's game on. It's a fair fight for them. We have the ability, and we proved this with Midnight Hammer, we have the ability to reach all the way across the world and strike our enemies if we want to and then pull our troops back away from their striking distance. So, I think this is like the easiest one for Trump to give to the Iranians say, "Okay, fine. We'll pull out We'll pull the vast majority of our basing out of the region. We'll occasionally use some places here and there for for overflight. Fine, we'll give you that one." And then Trump can turn to the American people and say, "Yeah, these bases were dumb anyways." Just like he's doing with with a lot of the basing in Europe. He can be like, "This is an old construct. We're getting ripped off on the whole deal. We're going to bring our guys back home." It's like win-win for both sides. So, I think that's an easy one that we can just move on past, give the Iranians a quick win, we take a quick win, it's tactically good business for us as well.

[00:09:35]I agree with you. Final question, and this is a little bit of a maybe controversial or tricky one. So, you know, a few weeks back there was an alleged rescue operation on Iranian soil by the US military. We lost several military air aircraft in that in that mission.

[00:09:55]I don't think we're getting the whole story there. I want to know why we were so far in Iranian territory. Was there an effort to retrieve enriched uranium?

[00:10:07]Is that what was going on there?

[00:10:10]I was out of the government by then, so honestly I I don't know.

[00:10:13]Um, the the good news that came out of that, number one is that no one none of our guys were killed and we got them all out. But number two, whether that was a botched operation or that was actually legitimately a recovery operation, we did get a taste of how hard it is to operate in Iran. Iran's a big country.

[00:10:30]We projecting power into Iran is actually very very challenging. And I'm glad that we got everybody out without anyone hurt and that gave President Trump a taste of how challenging boots on the ground operations would be because prior to that we were seeing a full court press by Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity, FDD, all of them were yelling about, you know, going boots on the ground, taking one of the islands, you know, actually putting forces in there to support some of the the so-called resistance fighters. Ever since that happened, a lot of those cries have died down and I think the president saw, you know, how close he was to becoming like Jimmy Carter and having a a desert one type of scenario when we went in back in '79 and tried to recover our hostages and we had that catastrophic accident.

[00:11:14]So, I I don't have any like inside information. I don't know. I'm just really glad that everyone got out okay and we and we kind of got our fill of it hopefully got our fill of attempting boots on the ground operations. Yeah, I mean if that was an enlightening experience for the president and that would prevent boots on the ground, then I'm all for I'm all for it because I think it would be disastrous. Especially when you consider what the you know, the number of troops that went into Iraq in that preemptive war. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of troops. We have like what, 50,000 military personnel and about I don't know how many of them are combat veterans or of combat troops. Uh but not all 50,000 of them are. And so you compare the terrain or uh the size of Iran versus Iraq. I mean, it's night and day. It's a far more challenging war.

[00:12:03]Putting boots on the ground is like a death sentence for our soldiers. I really, really want to prevent that from happening. But I I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today and give us a little bit of um you know, knowledge on what's going on. And I hope you'll come back soon. Thank you so much.

[00:12:18]Anytime. Thanks for having me. Every time you ring the bell below, an angel gets his wings. Totally not true, but it does keep you updated on our live shows.