In Conversation with Norm Ornstein

4 March 2026

[Transcript edited for Clarity and Flow]

Mary: Oh my goodness. We’re a little late because of technical difficulties, but look who is here with me on Substack Live—one of my favorite people on the planet, the amazing Norm Ornstein. Norm, hi.

Norm: Hi, Mary.

Mary: I would ask you how you’re doing, but I think that’s an absurd question.

Norm: Yeah, it is.

Mary: Yeah. So I did, of course, want to start with the unavoidable. We are now a country at war. Donald got what he always wanted, despite pretending otherwise—he’s a war president. So if you could share with us your thoughts about how we got here, the crazy-making and revolving rationales for having gotten into this disaster, where are the Republicans in Congress, and what can we expect?

Norm: This is what a shit show we have right now. I keep calling it Operation Epstein Files.

Mary: Yep.

Norm: This was a huge set of blunders—the gang that can’t bomb straight, in some respects. What’s clear at this point is that Donald looks at Venezuela and sees a template for what he’s going to do with Iran now, with Cuba next. God knows what will follow—Greenland, probably.

And of course, what we know about Venezuela, if this is the template, is: you snatch one dictator—or in the case of Iran, kill. Let’s face it: he snatched Maduro, put him in probably a halfway decent cell, but made it clear that he’s going into a hellhole concentration camp unless he says that Venezuela tilted the 2020 elections away from him.

But we replaced him with his successor—another dictator—and it’s become at least as vicious in Venezuela. And what we get in return is the oil and the money that comes from the oil that’s going into another Donald slush fund.

So if that’s what we get with Iran—if we’ve taken out Ayatollah Khamenei and he gets replaced with one of the Ayatollah’s designated successors—we have the same repressive regime, but in return, we take some of their oil and turn it into an even bigger slush fund for Donald. How does that benefit Americans? And especially, how does that benefit the Americans who’ve died in the process?

What we also know is they have no rationale for this, except for multiple rationales that change by the hour. One is: “Well, we only went in because Israel was going in regardless.” Another is: “We want regime change, but we don’t want to call it regime change.” Another is: “We want to take out their nuclear capability,” because they were days away from it—after Donald, with the last bombing, said it was obliterated and won’t be back for years. Another is: “We want to take out their ballistic missiles,” which have no threat to the United States. And who knows what the next rationale is going to be.

Mary: What we do—there’s one more. The egregious Secretary of State and part-time Diet Coke button-man, Marco Rubio, said that Israel was going to attack Iran, and then Iran would attack U.S. facilities. So therefore, what choice did we have?

Norm: Yeah. So now Iran is attacking U.S. facilities. So there we go with that.

But along with that, let’s point out a couple of other things. Cash Patel—after his taxpayer-funded multimillion-dollar, probably hundred-million-dollar trip so that he could swig beers with the hockey team—decided, after he heard that Donald was not happy with him, to fire 11 more FBI agents who presumably had something to do with the Mar-a-Lago classified documents raid.

And it turns out that they were the elite force focused on Iran.

We know that our counterterrorism chief right now is a 22- or 23-year-old whose previous experience was as an intern and a grocery clerk. We have absolutely eviscerated in the State Department, the Defense Department, and the intelligence community our counterterror capabilities.

And we know for a certainty that Iran has, for many years, had sleeper terrorist cells all over Europe and in the United States, and they may not do terrorist attacks immediately.

We know, Mary, that when the U.S. tried unsuccessfully, the first go-round, to take out Muammar Gaddafi, it was a year later that we had the Lockerbie Pan Am crash. They take their time before they decide to retaliate.

And we know that in Iran, of course, the other part of this farce is that Donald said, “Well, we had successors. We were going to have this regime change, but we killed them all. We killed the ones we wanted to be there to take over.”

And what we now know—what we knew before—is that air attacks and bombings never result in regime change.

Now we have the possibility of American boots on the ground. We have little Marco Rubio, the soulless, horrible individual who is responsible, among other things, for at least 700,000 unnecessary deaths when he went along with blowing up AID—400,000 children—who has sold out Ukraine and sold out NATO.

Now they’re complaining that our NATO allies—who we have disparaged and said we would not support if they were attacked—are not allowing us to use their facilities for this. Now we’re saying they’re disloyal. God help us.

But we are left with the possibility of another Iraq, even with Rubio saying, “This will not be another Iraq.” Knowing we have bozos like Markwayne Mullin saying, “Well, this is not regime change, but we want to change the regime.” Weird.

We are in a bad place. And even if we have taken out the horrible, monstrous Ayatollah—who was one of the worst people on the planet—even if we’ve taken out some others in his entourage, the fact is Khamenei was not running the country. The Revolutionary Guards were running the country, and there are huge numbers of them. They completely control the economy. They’re the ones who trigger the sleeper cells of terrorists. They’re not gone.

And the fact that Iran continues to be able to send drones and missiles to attack American interests is one of the worst…

Mary: And Pete Hegseth is Vladimir Putin’s best friend, but—

Norm: The fact that our soldiers were killed because they were in a trailer in Kuwait, not in any kind of secured facility—and Pete Hegseth says it was a secured trailer—it was a fucking trailer that made it easy for even a small drone to kill them all. This is farcical, but farcical not in a funny way—in a tragic way.

Mary: Yeah. And Norm, there’s so much that’s maddening about this that it’s difficult to stay focused. But I think if we recognize that all of these arguments are fallacious—Donald saying this is about nuclear weapons is absurd, given the fact, and this doesn’t get talked about enough, he unilaterally withdrew the United States of America from the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal.

So if he had been serious about containing Iran’s nuclear program, he wouldn’t have done that. So it’s all lies. It’s all based on trying to convince the American people that this makes any sense whatsoever.

You pointed out clearly: it’s not about regime change. First of all, do we seriously think that even if Khamenei did have power… he was 86. I’m pretty sure they’ve been planning his successor.

And as you mentioned—and what I found really bizarre about this—Donald made it seem like a point of pride. He’s like, “This was so effective that we actually killed all of the people we had identified to start a new regime, a pro-democracy regime.” He doesn’t care about the Iranian people any more than he cares about the American people.

And I think if we look at motives, you’re right: obviously with him, it’s always money. But given everything else that’s going on—and sorry, I should also say that he’s in a position to do this because, and there’s blood on so many people’s hands, he has suffered no consequences for kidnapping the head of state of another country. He suffered no consequences for his saber-rattling about Greenland.

And in the process, he has weakened our alliances. The differences between Iran and Iraq are… the situation is different. But starting with: Iran has 90 million people, and our allies do not seem to be rushing to help us here. Why should they?

He’s also given our allies fewer reasons to share intelligence with us because clearly we can’t be trusted. And as you mentioned, so much of the infrastructure of the American government has been weakened. The State Department isn’t even helping stranded Americans get home. They’re like, “Good luck.”

Just like Donald’s saying to the Iranian people: “Hey, we blew up a lot of shit. It’s up to you now. Good luck. Good luck taking over your government.”

So the evidence that this regime—the Trump regime—is not just incompetent, but sociopathically disinterested in protecting human beings from their depredations is still not evidence enough for Republicans in Congress to act like they have the constitutional power to stop this—which, by the way, they do. So what is up with that abdication?

Norm: It’s a cult, as we know, and that’s the one word that’s most important here. These are card-carrying members of the cult, and they are not going to challenge him—nor will anybody in the administration challenge him.

There are a few other points to make here, Mary. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs had leaked, before this happened, a story suggesting that this would not end well. We were not going to get help from our allies. But he would not confront Donald directly, knowing he would be fired if he did so. So nobody in this administration clearly took Donald aside and said, “If you do this, it could backfire big time.”

And there’s never been a second-day plan. There’s never been a “what happens after.”

We know that with every military incursion, with every war—and it was one of the most farcical elements—Anna Paulina Luna, who is one of the dumbest members of Congress, but also in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, said, “Well, it’s not a war. It’s strategic bombing. That’s not a war.”

So my immediate reaction was: “Oh, so 9/11 wasn’t a war against America. It was a strategic bombing.”

Mary: Oh.

Norm: Pearl Harbor was not a war. It was strategic bombing. They’re dancing around all of that.

But there are two other elements of this that I think are reflective of the craziness.

The first is: Kari Lake, who is an election-denying lunatic, running Voice of America and associated broadcasts, fired all of the people who speak Farsi, who could be communicating with Iranians so that we might be able to let them know what’s going on and give them traction to change the evil leadership they have.

The second, of course, is—as was almost predictable—the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and it’s going to be closed for a significant period of time.

Donald was bragging at his State of the Union and elsewhere: “Look at the price of gasoline,” lying, of course, that it’s below $2 a gallon.

I saw a report—whether it’s apocryphal or exaggerated or not—of one MAGA gas station owner who wanted to curry favor, who put his gasoline out at less than $2 a gallon. He thought, from his wife, who was his bookkeeper, that it might cost him two or three thousand dollars. It cost him $300,000, and he’s now bankrupt.

The people who suffer—as much as anybody other than immigrants and their families and the children who are separated—are the MAGA people who go along with this.

The price of gasoline is now going up. The markets are dropping as a consequence. Higher inflation—this is going to backfire every which way, and in a big-time fashion.

And if we end up with American troops going into Iran, it will not end well. We will have large numbers of casualties. And this may go on for years, just as we saw with Iraq and Afghanistan—except in a much more complicated place because, as you said, there are 90 million people.

Mary: Yeah. I have a very bad feeling about all of this because there could not be more incompetent, depraved people in charge right now. The Bush people were pretty depraved, but quickly: there is no good ending here.

There’s one less-bad option: that this ends more quickly. It doesn’t become a regional or global conflict that sucks everybody in. We minimize casualties—although we know the casualties have already been horrific.

Is this—if anything—going to stop Donald and get the Republicans out of power? Or are there too many Americans who think, “Ooh, wartime president, we have to support him and his party”?

Norm: I think he is going to keep his base for the foreseeable future because they are part of the cult. But he’s going to lose a lot of others.

If this has a longer-term impact on the economy and on what he ridiculed—“affordability”—in his State of the Union, there will be a bigger backlash.

But let’s face it: we know he has been planning for a long time to hijack the elections. It would not surprise me if this results in more of a backlash, and a much stronger sense that they’re on track to lose the House and Senate, and then he is going to…

First, it’s probably only a matter of time before John Thune—if he thinks the Senate majority could be lost—will blow up the filibuster to pass their so-called SAVE Act, which is an election and voter suppression act.

They keep saying—and lying—that it’s about voter ID. It’s not about voter ID. It’s about requiring everybody who is registered to vote to go back in person to re-register by bringing a passport, which a substantial share of Americans do not have, and which costs about $165, which makes it a poll tax—or a passport card, which requires a birth certificate to get. And the birth certificate has to be an embossed one, which will cost more money.

Beyond that, this bill now requires every state to submit its sensitive voter information to the Department of Homeland Security and Kristi Noem, and then to use what is called the SAVE software, which is a voter-purging software, which we know has at least a 14% error rate, and which will purge legitimate voters.

We know there will be other tactics used to try and tilt elections so they could never lose again. We also know Donald will haul out the military and others to seize ballots before they’re counted. There are all kinds of things that will be done.

The bottom line here, as you know better than anybody, is: as he pursues reckless, quixotic, unpopular policies, and there’s backlash from the public and his approval rating drops below 40%, instead of saying, “We better alter our policies so they work for people,” it’s: “We’re just going to make sure they don’t vote.”

Mary: That’s right.

Norm: So even if this backfires big time, he may not pay the consequences because he will become even more of an autocrat than he is now.

Mary: Right. But we also have to remember, as you said, this is Operation Epstein Files. We will never allow him or anybody else to forget that his name is in the Epstein files a million times, and it is not Hillary Clinton who needs to answer for that. It’s him. So we’re going to keep putting pressure on that. Absolutely.

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