Raging Moderates: How Trump’s Iran War Could Break the GOP (ft. Ben Shapiro)

Thanks for listening to Raging Moderates on the Prof G feed. This is just a preview of today’s full episode — and soon, we’ll be leaving this feed entirely. To get the full episode, subscribe to the Raging Moderates feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We’re dropping new episodes every weekday evening — five days a week. Subscribe on ⁠YouTube⁠, or check us out on ⁠Substack⁠ if you want it ad-free. Just hours before a fragile ceasefire deadline, tensions between the U. S. and Iran are escalating — and the political fallout at home is already taking shape. Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov sit down with Ben Shapiro, one of the most influential voices on the right, who has called this the “single bravest foreign policy move” of his lifetime. But as the risk of a prolonged conflict grows, so do the stakes: for American power, for President Trump, and for the future of the Republican Party. They press Shapiro on whether this risks becoming the kind of “forever war” Republicans once opposed, what a realistic definition of “winning” actually looks like, and how this moment could reshape the GOP heading into 2028. They also dive into the fractures emerging inside the conservative movement — from Tucker Carlson and the right-wing media ecosystem to the growing divide among younger Republicans. Follow Jessica Tarlov,⁠ @JessicaTarlov⁠ Follow Prof G,⁠ @profgalloway⁠ Follow Raging Moderates, ⁠@RagingModeratesPod⁠ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@RagingModerates⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Jessica Tarlov?

  Hey, thanks for listening to Raging Moderates here on the Prof G feed. This is just a preview of today's episode, and soon we'll be leaving this feed entirely. To get the full episode, you'll want to subscribe to the Raging Moderates feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We're dropping new episodes every weekday evening, so you can now get Scott and me five days a week. Subscribe on YouTube or check us out on Substack if you want it ad-free. All right, here's a preview of today's show.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Of course, there was always going to be fragmentation in a second term of a presidency because whoever is the uniting figure is no longer going to be the uniting figure three years from now. And so people inside that broader kind of movement start to look at, okay, who's the next guy? What is the next thing that's going to happen? And in the Republican Party, where there's pretty significant debate between a wide variety of wings on a lot of these matters, that is breaking out into the open. I don't find any of that particularly shocking. The only thing that I do find shocking is some of the sort of conspiratorial nonsense that has been promoted by some of these major influencers.

• 1:49Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.

• 1:50Jessica Tarlov?

  And I'm Jessica Tarlov.

• 1:52Scott Galloway?

  Today, we're joined by one of the most influential voices. I don't want to say on the right. I'll just say one of the most influential voices. Also, I'm just an enormous fan of Ben, and then we were just saying off mic. It's weird that we haven't met before. And really... Don't always, you know, I hate the land acknowledgement of saying I don't always agree with him, but I don't, but I appreciate the moral clarity and just the reasoning. And literally the last person I would ever want to see on the other side of a stage in a debate. He's been a forceful defender of the Iran war, calling it the single bravest foreign policy move of his lifetime. And even as the ceasefire hangs in the balance and visible fractures begin to emerge within the MAGA coalition, we thought the best guest to have here would be, of course, Ben Shapiro,

• 2:35Scott Galloway?

  host of The Ben Shapiro Show and co-founder of The Daily Wire. Ben, it really is a real pleasure to have you. Thanks for being here.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Now, Scott and Jessica, I really appreciate you having me. It's very kind of you. And of course, I've listened to your show for a long time as well, so.

• 2:47Scott Galloway?

  If you aren't already, please make sure to subscribe to our YouTube page to stay in the loop on all news politics. So let's, let's get into the news of the day and then we'll, we'll zoom out and talk a little bit about the state of affairs in DC and between the parties. We're just hours before the ceasefire deadline and the US and Iranian officials both sending mixed signals, naval confrontations escalating in the Strait of Hormuz and peace talks hanging on by a thread. The question now isn't just how this ends, but is the conflict already reshaping American power, the Republican Party, MAGA and the broader global order? Just yesterday, dozens of veterans were arrested for protesting the war at the Capitol. You've called this war a defining act of strength.

• 3:30Scott Galloway?

  I'm curious, give us your sense of the state of play here and drill down as deep as you want or pull back as far as you want, but sort of Iran, question mark, your thoughts?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Sure. I mean, it's obviously very difficult to kind of summarize where we are in, in terms of this moment because we don't know. I don't know, I'm not sure anybody knows outside the President of the United States and the Iranians on the other side of the table. And so sort of operating through a, a glass half darkly here, it's difficult to sort of foresee what's going to happen next. The, the reason that I think that this is a defining act of clarity and moral action on behalf of the, of the administration is that the Iranian. Islamic Republic has been a thorn in the side of the West since its establishment in 1979. It is responsible for the death of hundreds, if not thousands, of American citizens. It has spread its terror tentacles all over the region. It has indeed spread its terror tentacles beyond the region. It was building up a nuclear weapons cache.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  It was also building up a massive ballistic missile arsenal that was capable of generating an umbrella that would have protected the incipient nuclear program from some sort of defenestration by the United States, or by Israel, or by any other Gulf allies. And so for the president to essentially say to the Iranians that no longer will you be able to call America's bluff on this, and sort of sweet-talk us into a North Korean-style slide into an armed nuclear state that is now immovable with significantly more reach abroad than North Korea does. We don't think too much about North Korea these days because unless North Korea is exploding a bomb in an attempt to sort of leverage the world into paying it money, they don't seem to pose too much of an external threat, maybe to

• 5:10Speaker 02

  South Korea, but not much beyond that. Iran is a very different story. Iran has created chaos in the region, all the way across from Iraq, through Syria, into Lebanon, down south toward Yemen, via Saudi Arabia. They have created chaos. They have bases in South America. Iran has much more external aspiration than the North Koreans ever did. You arm that regime with a nuclear weapon, and suddenly the possibility of true global conflict gets extremely, extremely severe. And so the president saying that he does not trust that future presidents are going to take the threat seriously, I think he is correct in that. And the move along with the Israelis to go after Iran's defenses, to take out their air force, to take out their navy, to seriously damage their ballistic missile capacity,

• 5:54Speaker 02

  and to do it while the Iranian economy was basically on its last footing, I think it was a unique target of opportunity. And again, I think the way that I'm explaining it is a bit different from the way that the president has explained it. I think there are probably reasons for that that we can discuss. But I think that there are a few sort of preconditions that the American people tend to think of with regard to war that I tend to think are wrong. But unfortunately, I think that the war tends to be explained in those terms and that leads to some confusion. So, for example, when the president says they were an imminent threat, people tend to think imminent threat means that a plane was about to fly into a building in New York City. The more accurate term here would have been preemptive war, but of course, we're not allowed to talk about preemptive war in the aftermath of Iraq. The same thing is true with regard to regime change.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  This is not technically a regime change war, but it is a slow-rolling regime change war in the sense that the damage done to the Iranian economy does put that regime in significantly more deteriorating position than they were before the war, and they were in serious trouble before the war. And the president doesn't want to talk about regime change because that would necessitate certain activity because of the attempt to deliver on that would then require activity he doesn't want to do, like boots on the ground. So, again, I think that what's actually happening and the disconnect between that and what is rhetorically being sold is pretty severe, and I can understand why people's heads are spinning along those axes. But the notion that Iran is somehow strengthened after its entire upper echelon has been destroyed, after its air force is non-existent, after its navy is essentially non-existent, and

• 7:21Speaker 02

  after it's been forced, I think it's an act of weakness, to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which cannot and will not, I think, last for very much longer. If that's what it's been relegated to and its terror arms have been defenestrated in places like Lebanon, in places like Syria, this is a much weakened Iran regime in that aspect. I think the president has done something truly incredible here.

• 7:39Scott Galloway?

  So, I think there's a lot of merit in the arguments that this is a unique moment in time, an opportunity, their defense is totally, totally destroyed, the IRGCs seem to be wobbling, the idea of further diminishing their ability to fund terror across their, through their proxies across the region, taking out their navy, diminishing their missile infrastructure, all of these things, check, check, check. How would you respond to the notion that this entire conflict or war demonstrates or defines operational excellence but strategic incompetence? To not anticipate the Strait of Hormuz being seized by the Iranians, to not... Have a plan for getting expats out of the region, for not anticipating that these military bases would become a target.

• 8:22Scott Galloway?

  I think more missiles have been fired into the UAE than into Israel. I think it's hard to argue that Iran isn't weakened. I worry that the reputation of the US has been weakened because this has been so, the operation itself at a strategic level, has been so mishandled. Your thoughts?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  So I kind of object to the idea that the operation itself has been deeply mishandled. I think we're not going to know the answer to that until after the war is over because obviously the outcome of a war is what determines whether we thought it was well thought. I think if you had stopped World War II in 1942, you would have thought, okay, things are going really, really poorly. So the outcome of a war determines whether or not the American people like it and whether the world takes away from it a particular message, and that's true of every war. And so it's hard to sort of forecast what the eventual impact will be until we get to the end point. The notion that the Strait of Hormuz was unforeseen, I find it hard to believe that no one in the Pentagon foresaw the possibility of the Iranians firing drones at large-scale tankers that don't move very fast through a very narrow choke point.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  My guess is that the United States military probably thought that that was a counterproductive move for the Iranians to take, that if they did that, they would eventually end up cutting off their nose to spite their face and destroying their own capacity to import and export the only thing keeping their economy alive because they don't have the ability to export oil to the East. And in fact, that is what's happened. And I think that what President Trump did here in sort of reverse blockading the Iranian ships, the weirdness at the beginning of the war is that the United States was allowing Iran to ship in and out oil in order to keep the oil prices down. And that was the strategic incompetence to me, if anything. It seems to me that if we had from the very beginning said Iran is not getting a thing in and it's not getting a thing out, and they are going to abide by the same rules that they have dictated to everybody else, the most damaging thing the United States has done to Iran at this point is probably not even the military barrage that has been

• 10:08Speaker 02

  unleashed on Iran or even the killing of its leadership. What's happening right now in preventing Iran from exporting something like $400 million worth of oil every single day is devastating to the regime, a regime that was already on its last legs economically. The real is trading at zero right now. I mean, they literally do not have a currency that is worth, it's not even close to worth its paper. It's not worth a ton of paper at this point. And so, again, I think that if there was anything that was sort of unforeseen here, I think the only thing that was unforeseen, and I think it should have been foreseen, if the question is sort of what is the mistake here? I think that the mistake is the belief that a rational actor would emerge on the other side to take the sort of Venezuelan position. And I think that that may have been a misread. But I don't think that that's a misread of the Strait of Hormuz as much

• 10:53Speaker 02

  as it is a misread of the of the intent of the Ayatollahs, which is to retain power at any cost up to and including the slaughter of vast numbers of its own citizens, the complete starvation of its population, and the belief that as long as they just outlast, that they will win. And this is sort of the weirdness of the modern era, is that you never will get a surrender on paper from anyone ever again. And so if the rule is the only way that the West wins, is if the other side cries uncle, it's not possible for the West to win a war probably ever again.

• 11:19Scott Galloway?

  Before we go, a reminder that not only is Raging Moderates now five days a week, we're now available on Substack. Subscribers get ad-free episodes, live streams, and a place to connect with me, Jess, and the rest of the community. Find us at ragingmoderates.proptumedia.com. Thanks for joining us today.

• 11:37Jessica Tarlov?

  See you later.

• 11:49Speaker 03

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