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President Donald Trump faced pointed criticism over the Iran war in a closed-door meeting with fellow Republicans on Wednesday, shortly before his administration asked Congress for tens of billions of dollars to pay for the conflict. Several Republicans who attended said Trump engaged in a shouting match with Senator Bill Cassidy, who said the administration needed to explain a framework deal Trump signed last week that gives Iran financial incentives but falls short of the goals he laid out at the war's beginning. #simonmarks #andrewmarr #donaldtrump #iran #iranwar #uspolitics #LBC
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oil supplies. I'm joined in the studio by LBC's Washington correspondent, Simon Marks. Simon
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great to have you actually here live in the studio for once. It's brilliant. Can I start by asking
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first of all, these characters in Congress, senior Republicans that Trump can't quite ignore
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Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Not least because in the last few weeks
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they found a teeny, teeny little bit of spine. And so they've begun standing up to him
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particularly because many of them are enraged that he engaged in successful efforts to lead to the deselection of some Republicans in the Senate
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who are now going to be, if they win the election in November, be replaced by more pro-Trump, reliably make America great again
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So they've got nothing to lose in the Senate. So some of these people have nothing to lose, like, for example, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana
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who knows he's not coming back to Congress in January and who had a stand-up blazing row with President Trump yesterday over Iran
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The president went to Capitol Hill because he is currently refusing to sign a critical piece of legislation
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that will reform housing policy in the U.S. that the Republicans have passed in the Senate
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He says, I'm not signing that legislation unless and until you, the Republicans in the Senate, pass what is called the Save America Act, which is voting reform
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He wants, by the time the midterms roll around in November, every voter across the country who wants to participate in the elections to prove they've got photo ID that they can present and also to prove that they are American citizens
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And the Republicans in the Senate, many of them, don't like this because under the terms of the Constitution, it's not the federal government's job to run elections
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It falls to the individual 50 states. So he went there yesterday to give them a barracking over their failure to pass this Save America Act
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He then got confronted by Senator Cassidy and others over Iran. It was, according to people who were in the room, an extraordinary, blazing, furious performance by the president
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He wouldn even allow their leader Senator John Thune the Republican majority leader in the Senate to speak at this lunch this closed lunch But the bludgeoning the bluster the bullying worked
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because hours after the lunch ended, they did a rerun of the vote that was going to tie his hands on Iran
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and even Senator Cassidy changed his vote and backed Donald Trump. So he's won that crucial vote in the Congress
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He sends him a message that you can use the bully pulpit to your own advantage by going up there and beating these guys into literal submission
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So that was an extraordinary event inside Washington. Beyond Washington, inflation up to 4.1 percent
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Yes. And, I mean, it's moving in the wrong direction, obviously, because of his war on Iran
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which is why some of the Republicans have been standing up to him, because they sense that this is going to be disastrous on the doorstep between now and November
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I think it was at 3.8% last month, now up to 4.1%. He is obviously still promising that the price of petrol and gas is going to fall
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as a result of the Strait of Hormuz being reopened, except, as you've been reporting, it ain't fully reopened yet
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And there's another row about that. So huge hostage to fortune here for him, but more importantly for those lawmakers
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the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate, who will be on the ballot in November
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And we think our politics is wild. Simon, thank you very much indeed for that
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Now, Simon is, of course, on for Ian Dale from Seven. So please stay tuned in for that
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5.39 is the time. Ben Kentish here on LBC. Next. I don't know anything. I see that he was, I guess, the mayor of a town
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I hear he's extremely liberal. Extremely. so that means he probably won up enough than us
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Donald Trump there giving his first thoughts on Andy Burnham, very likely to become our next Prime Minister
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How should Burnham handle Trump and what might the relationship between those two leaders look like
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Simon Marks is LBC's Washington correspondent and this week sitting in for Ian Dale from Seven Hit on LBC
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Simon, lovely to have you with us. Is it fair to say, do you think, that before a couple of days ago
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Donald Trump would have had absolutely no clue whatsoever who Andy Burnham was Yeah and it actually I think not even clear Ben that he knows who Andy Burnham is now
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I mean, that description yesterday of Andy Burnham as being the mayor of a town
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I mean, it's not as though Andy Burnham's been running local councils in Poughkeepsie
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He's the mayor of a major city in this country. And then saying that Andy Burnham's extremely liberal
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which, of course, is the language that you use in the United States to talk about left-wingers
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He said worse things, for example, about Zoran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City
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with whom he now has a positive relationship. But immediately going to his conclusion that because Andy Burnham is extremely liberal
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he's not going to open up new oil and gas fields in the North Sea
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suggests that the president has not been briefed about Andy Burnham at all
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because if he had been briefed, he would know that Andy Burnham has described
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Sir Keir Starmer's decision not to engage in more drilling in the North Sea as economic madness
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And there is every indication that to the great disappointment of Ed Miliband
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Andy Burnham is going to move forward and on that singular issue satisfy Donald Trump
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But there's another side to the equation, of course, which is Donald Trump's insistence
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that unless Britain seals its borders, as he puts it, the UK is dying
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There's no future. We're in for civilisational collapse here. On that issue, Andy Burnham is not going to satisfy the president of the United States
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in the way in which a Nigel Farage or Rupert Low would. Just on that, I mean, it struck me that that got almost no attention
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that comment about the UK dying, Simon, because I suppose it's par for the course now with Donald Trump
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And yet, you know, we have to pause sometimes and just remind ourselves that an incumbent US president describing a close ally like our country as dying
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is just completely and utterly incredible and unprecedented. Yeah, I mean, you have to ask yourself how we got here
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And to find out how we got here, you then need to read
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the US government's Trump-orchestrated national security strategy. It's a national security strategy that says the United States government
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believes that Europe is now engaged in civilisational collapse And the only grounds for optimism that it finds in Europe is the rise of what it calls patriotic European parties
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And by that, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance mean Reform UK
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and they now also mean Restore Britain. They certainly don't mean Labour
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They don't mean the Tories. They don't mean the Lib Dems or the Greens
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they are going to continue making life miserable for whoever is in number 10 Downing Street leading a Labour government
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because the ultimate goal is to grease the skids for Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, a coalition of the two of them
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to find themselves in the catbird seat politically. Simon, just on that, let's just focus for a minute finally on Andy Burnham
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I know you've spent a lot of time following Donald Trump up close and personal. I'm sorry that you had to do so
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But from what you've seen and what we know of Andy Burnett
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what chance do you give him of forming a more successful and positive relationship with Donald Trump than Keir Starmer's managed to form
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Well, there's no question, as we've been hearing all week on your programme and on mine
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that he's Mr Affability. And so they're going to get on because he's got a very warm, welcoming personality
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And yet there are going to be very significant policy differences, I think, between the two of them
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I do think it's worth, though, just looking at the example of Zoran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, a democratic socialist dismissed by Donald Trump when he was running for election as a communist
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You know, we were hearing that Zoran Mamdani was going to turn New York into what the Soviet Union had looked like when Leonid Brezhnev was running it
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Then the two of them met at the Oval Office. We all thought that day that we were going to see another drubbing of Volodymyr Zelensky being meted out to Mamdani
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And to everyone's amazement, Trump discovered that when he spoke to Mamdani, they actually found some common cause politically
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So there's a window definitely for improving the relationship. But again, that national security strategy is all about promoting reform and restore here
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Simon, great to have you with us. Thank you very much. Simon Marks, LBC's Washington correspondent
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Back in for Ian Dale with you from 7 o'clock tonight right here on LBC
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