New Big Ben Show: Will Trump Go To War With Iran?

Interviews with Newt Gingrich, Lucas Tomlinson, and Kara Kennedy

Jun 19, 2025

Latest edition of The Big Ben Show dropped, and you can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Conversations include Lucas Tomlinson on the latest re: Israel and Iran, Newt Gingrich on his new book and the president’s foreign policy, and Kara Kennedy on Real Housewife gossip and Meghan Markle. Listen, review, share and subscribe!

What Will Trump Do?

Semafor reads the tea leaves:

President Donald Trump is receiving wildly divergent guidance from a splintered Republican Party as he weighs a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Sen. Lindsey Graham and other hawks have told Trump to “finish the job,” even if it means the US taking military action against nuclear facilities, according to the South Carolina Republican.
Then there’s the more nuanced view of Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., a former Navy SEAL who likened the current moment to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. He wants to prevent Iran from gaining access to a nuclear weapon but said it’s “completely unrealistic” for Republicans to argue the US can bomb Tehran’s enrichment facilities at Fordow and call it a day.
“Wars are messy. They’re long and they’re unclear. Rarely will one single action spell the end of a conflict. Us taking out the nuclear capability, I don’t think it’s the endgame,” Sheehy told Semafor moments after sparring with a protester. “As the president said, as pretty much everyone agrees — even that crazy Code Pink lady — I don’t want them to have nuclear weapons.”
Though he stands nearly alone, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is sending a harsher warning: that a pre-emptive strike would be unconstitutional and could draw the US or its allies into a messy war.
The cacophony of voices reflects a Republican Party that’s fractured over how closely to align with a president who has reshaped its ideology in his image. Even as the GOP divides over potential entanglement in the Middle East, the decision to more fully join Israel’s campaign in Iran is Trump’s alone. And most of the party will follow him, whatever he chooses.
He insisted Wednesday afternoon that he wants to avoid “long-term war” and seems unconcerned about those who might be “a little bit unhappy now” over the possibility of the US getting more directly engaged.
“I only want one thing: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That’s it,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.
One Pentagon official told Semafor that there was “no indication” bombing action was close as of Wednesday, pointing to low US critical munitions reserves as “a significant, even primary concern” that could deter a quick strike in the end.
Meanwhile, his White House is seeking counsel from a wide range of advisers, and senators like Graham and Sheehy, as he considers a move that could reshape the course of his presidency. They’re also hearing from what one Republican lawmaker called “so-called influencers who have no influence.”
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and The War Room’s Steve Bannon are making clear that they’re against direct US military involvement against Iran (Trump said Carlson called him to apologize).
But other pundits who have the president’s ear, like radio host Mark Levin and Fox News’ Sean Hannity, are more on the side of US involvement, to say nothing of GOP hawks in Congress who have long doubted that diplomacy with Iran can work.
In fact, Trump’s sheer openness to striking Iran shows how far his version of “America First” has come from its non-interventionist origins. There are plenty of signs that Trump is listening to GOP hawks more than one might assume for someone who selected JD Vance as his vice president.

More opinions and coverage on this from:

Can Fordow Even Be Destroyed?

According to Axios, Trump is asking a repeated question: would a bunker buster bomb approach even work? On this topic, Tablet interviews former IAEA inspector David Albright:

It would still be very hard for Iran to move to build a bomb right now. In the long run Iran can replace the nuclear scientists killed this week, but in the short run they can’t. It’s a real shock to the system that makes the nuclear weapon itself.
You also have this destruction at the Isfahan enriched uranium metal production line. So you have just a chunk taken out of the line of things that have to be done to make the weapon-grade uranium core component … I think that Israel is deliberately trying to increase the time frame, I would say by at least a half a year or more, for Iran to be able to make even a non-missile-deliverable nuclear weapon, while also making Iran more scared to start that process.
On the fissile material, it really all hinges on Fordow and how many more centrifuges Iran has made that it hasn’t deployed.
On Friday Israel destroyed the power station supplying the Natanz nuclear facility. I’ve read, including in the ISIS report, that if the centrifuges inside Natanz are left without power long enough they will become permanently disabled. How does that work?
A centrifuge has a rotor that spins at a very high speed. If you cut off electricity, it’ll spin more slowly and finally stop. But as it traverses down from around 450 meters per second, sort of the speed of a bullet fired from a handgun, it’ll hit resonances and will start to shake violently. And then it’ll hit the wall and break. A centrifuge operator has to have a strategy to get through the resonances … but in an uncontrolled shutdown, gradually speed goes down through the resonances and that maximizes the chance of a vibration that leads to the rotor crashing against the wall of the centrifuge’s outer case.
During one of the first deals with Iran, in 2003, Iran agreed to shut down 164 centrifuges, its first cascade. But they weren’t that experienced. One-third broke when they shut them down, and that was a controlled shutdown.
When I read that Israel had destroyed the power source for Natanz without necessarily destroying the underground centrifuge halls, the next obvious question in my mind was: Could something similar be done at Fordow? Is it possible to disable Fordow by attacking the power supply and thus avoiding the issue of having to bomb so deep underground?
They could do that. I’m actually wondering why they haven’t yet. Fordow is much more deeply buried than Natanz. It’s 80 meters or so underground. Israel could take out the ventilation system at Fordow and make it impossible to really work in that environment. I don’t understand why they haven’t yet. They could make it inoperative and if Iran moves to fix it, they can bomb it again. So as long as Israel is active over the skies of Iran, they can keep Fordow and Natanz inoperable.
Can Israel destroy Fordow without American help?
Yeah, I think so. They could mine it during a commando raid. They could potentially crack the ceiling or undermine the support structure of the halls. They can make it very difficult to get into. Effectively that’s destroying it, if you can’t get in without months and months of work. Then when you get in, it’s more than likely most of the centrifuges are going to be broken.
So Fordow’s power supply is above ground?
Yeah. There are no generators underground as far as I know.

NY Mag has more.

The Liberal vs. Conservative Happiness Gap

Nate Silver:

Still, arguably that SBSQ buried the most interesting finding, which is that conservatives have much higher self-reported mental health than liberals. It’s a wide gap: according to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES) — a very large sample survey (60,000 respondents) that provides the opportunity for highly detailed demographic analysis — among people who report “excellent” mental health, conservatives outnumber liberals 51-20. But liberals outnumber conservatives 45-19 among those voters who say they have “poor” mental health.
Could this reflect a spurious correlation? In other words, that voters with characteristics associated with lower happiness tend to be attracted to liberalism, but that political attitudes themselves don’t tell you much on their own?
In short, no. Or at least, probably not. The difference between liberals and conservatives is remarkably persistent even once you control for those factors.
I’m going to show you a very long chart, where I translated the five choices that the CES provided to a 100-point scale: 0 for “poor” mental health, 25 for “fair”, 50 for “good”, 75 for “very good” and 100 for “excellent”. The average American self-reports at a 60 on this scale: in other words, somewhere between good and very good mental health. But liberals average a score of 53 and conservatives a 68. (I’m just going to ignore moderates for the rest of this post because they’re predictably somewhere in the middle, averaging a 58.)

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