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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 22 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump faced tough questioning from reporters Tuesday about his worsening Iran debacle, and he quickly lost his temper. In the process, however, he revealed that the lines of questioning were correct. Trump simply does not know how to extricate himself from this mess. It’s no accident that this comes as Republicans are reportedly sinking into a very bleak realization about this situation. Trump’s own allies now fear that he’s stuck in a quagmire that could continue right through the elections.We’re trying to make sense of it all with Marie Harf, a former State Department official who was an advisor to the team that negotiated Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. Marie, nice to have you on.Marie Harf: Thank you so much. I guess I would say I’m happy to be here, but with the news where it is, it’s a strange time to be commenting on these things.Sargent: It sure is. It’s a real disaster. So right now we’re up to at least 14 U.S. troop deaths in the Iran war, and the Pentagon is running out of money for it. The White House is demanding another $87 billion. Meanwhile, Trump is stating categorically that he’s won already, that he’s won the war—if he ended it tomorrow, it would be a great triumph. But the Strait of Hormuz is still mostly closed. There’s no end in sight. Marie, can you just sum up how we got to this point and where we are now?Harf: Well, where we are now is, it seems like we’re back in almost a full-scale war between the United States and Iran. Since President Trump did something no other U.S. president had ever done—militarily attack Iran—realizing after he did that, that even if you could kill the leadership, even if you could damage their military, the regime would stay in power, they would shut down the Strait of Hormuz, they would cripple the global economy, and they would continue attacking us in the region—President Trump knew he needed a way out. So he negotiated this ceasefire about a month ago that today is sitting in tatters. Because the Iranians know they have the upper hand. They have the leverage. They have survived U.S. military power. They have shown they can control the global economy, and they can stay in power.Sargent: Let’s check out what Trump says when he’s questioned by a reporter. Note that when Trump says Iran might want to surrender, the reporter flatly points out that, well, Iran continues to attack our allies and Iran continues to kill American soldiers, and that sets Trump off. Listen to this.Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President, there are no signs that Iran is ready to stop fighting. So what is the plan? Is the plan to just keep bombing until they give up?Trump (voiceover): Well, how would you know there are no signs? Why? Do you know something that I don’t know?Reporter (voiceover): Well, they continue to attack our allies and kill Americans.Trump (voiceover): You don’t know what the dialogue is behind the scenes: that they want to meet desperately to try and end it, because they’re getting decimated. You don’t get that when you listen to your fake station, but you don’t know—you don’t know anything.Reporter (voiceover): So talks are still possible?Trump (voiceover): Do you know something I don’t know? Reporter (voiceover): Well, tell us. Trump (voiceover): I will tell you — they want to desperately meet. And until they’re ready to meet in a meaningful way, we have no interest in even meeting with them. Sargent: So let’s break this up into pieces. First, it’s interesting that Trump says Iran desperately wants to meet, which is supposed to show that he’s won a glorious victory. But then seconds later, he suggests that Iran doesn’t want to meet in a meaningful way. So if they don’t want to meet meaningfully, how has he won? Didn’t Trump undercut himself there?Harf: I think this may be the issue where the fact that Trump is very divorced from reality is most noticeable. Because I think we all know that his team doesn’t give him good information on many subjects. They don’t give him the actual truth. And we have reports that he just gets every day video of the coolest bombs being dropped in Iran. I think he has absolutely no sense of what’s actually happening here.Sargent: I think that’s absolutely right. It seems to me that he doesn’t understand the situation on the most fundamental level. Military force exercised by the U.S. is not enough to get Iran to agree to what Trump wants Iran to agree to. And so we’re trapped in this weird Trumpian reality loop where he just keeps saying over and over that he’s going to obliterate them, or he’s going to really hit them hard this time. I mean, he already said he was going to obliterate their civilization entirely, and that didn’t force Iran’s hand. So now we’re back to, I’m going to bomb them again really hard this time. And I think there’s a real disconnect there that you really put your finger on.Harf: The Iranian regime has shown that they can withstand quite a bit of American military power and stay in charge of the country. And it used to be that the threat of the U.S. striking them was so great that you could convince them to do things. Not anymore. They realize they have the leverage. The Iranians are very astute followers of American politics. We learned this during the Iran negotiations under President Obama. They can read polls as well as we can. They know that the American people do not support this war. They certainly do not support a return to an even broader conflict with Iran, and that President Trump is very cognizant of the time ticking towards the midterm. So look, the Iranians, sure, they’re happy to talk. But sitting here right now, they know that they still have missiles they can fire, they still have a nuclear program, they still have enriched nuclear material. And the president keeps making threats that he can’t back up.Sargent: Yeah, in fact, Trump said something else that really kind of illustrates this reality distortion loop of his. He said, “Honestly, they haven’t seen anything yet. We’ve been nice. We’ve been nice.” You’ve been inside this beast before. What is he being told, exactly?Harf: This is a very different beast, I think, than any of us are used to. I think that they confuse tactical military success with strategic victory. We can do a lot of damage to Iran’s military and civilians and infrastructure. We’ve seen all of that damage being done. None of that has—or, I would argue, will—lead to a stronger position for the United States. Anyone who has ever followed this topic would have told you that if the United States attacked, the first thing any rational country would do is close the Strait of Hormuz. It’s their trump card.I don’t think that the Iranians are particularly scared that President Trump is going to rain some military firepower down on them that they haven’t already seen. And so I don’t think that they take his threat seriously. I think that he’s become kind of a joke in these negotiations. And I don’t say that lightly—the damage we are doing, including to civilians in Iran, is quite serious. But I do not think that his threats hold any weight in these negotiations.Sargent: I really wonder if he’s intimating that he’s prepared to use nuclear weapons. Do you think that’s what he’s doing?Harf: That’s the nightmare scenario that I think we are all afraid of. I think he likes flirting with the idea. But I mean, we see this from Pete Hegseth, who’s up on Capitol Hill this week trying to get more money and support for this incredibly unpopular war. There’s just this obsession with using the strongest, toughest, most bellicose language they can come up with, like somehow that makes them tougher, more manly, more scary. And the Iranians, throughout their history, have fought wars for decades to stalemates, including with Iraq. Like, they are not scared of Trump tweeting at 3 a.m.Sargent: Yeah, I think the basic situation is that he just doesn’t know how to get out of it. That’s really the bottom line. Politico has this really striking new report, which suggests that Republicans are realizing this. It says GOP midterm anxiety is growing precisely because they see that Trump is stuck. One White House ally says, “This is what a quagmire looks like.” Marie, you now have Trump saying every American death will be avenged many times over by a much higher number of Iranian deaths. Is that tantamount to saying we’re now in an open-ended conflict? Is that where we are now?Harf: It seems that way. This feels like a new forever war, because there’s no clearly defined objective that we can meet or not meet. He has no way to get out of this. And the reason I say that is because there are two conflicting principles in Republican orthodoxy butting up against each other right now. This hawkish line that you never give anything to Iran—Republicans hated his ceasefire deal with Iran because it gave Iran everything and got nothing for the United States—coming up against a bad global economy, rising oil prices, and instability in a midterm year. Those are two fundamental principles that Republicans have claimed to care deeply about. Which one do you pick?Sargent: Yes, and in fact, Politico reports something that really bears out what you’re saying. It says this: “Republicans close to the White House are distressed about the war’s economic impact on everyday Americans in an election that is expected to hinge on cost of living issues.” Just to underscore your point a little more, the two conflicting forces are: one, you never give in to Iran at all, because we’re strong and they’re weak. But two, if you continue this war, we’re going to get crushed in the midterms, right?Harf: Exactly right. And we should not lose sight of the fact that President Trump chose to go to war. This was a war of choice. And it was one that Israel and others, really, for decades had wanted us to undertake. And President Trump was the first one to do it. But the problem is, he did it without a plan. And he did it without considering any of the consequences. And all those Republicans who used to make fun of us in the Obama administration for saying, think about the second and third and fourth order consequences if we have to take military action—which we were willing to do—they all made fun of us. Now they’re coming up against those. And they are realizing that you cannot just drop a bunch of bombs and do a bunch of tough talk on Twitter. That does not lead to a strategic victory for the United States against an enemy with a huge country, so many resources, geographic superiority in many ways. I don’t know, to your earlier question, I don’t know what information he’s getting, but this is the consequence of putting people like Pete Hegseth in charge of the United States military—people that are not serious, that just like to beat their chests and try and prove that the United States is still the strongest military in the world, with absolutely no plan for how to win wars.Sargent: I want to highlight one other thing from the Politico story, because it’s sort of amazing. It goes on to say that all this is casting a grim shadow over the campaign season for the GOP. One Republican is quoted saying this: the war has become “a persistent dark cloud that is souring the national mood, which typically depresses the base of the party in power and motivates supporters of the opposition.” That’s quite a quote from that Republican there. There’s a deep irony to this as well, which is that Republicans created this situation for themselves. They sent a very strong signal at the outset of this that they would not use their congressional power to constrain Trump, to exercise oversight on what he was doing, and to essentially vote on whether to go to war or not. They essentially said, Mr. President, you have a blank check. And now they’re screwed. That’s what happened.Harf: You’re exactly right. Look, 28 percent of Americans—only 28 percent—in recent polls said that the Iran war was worth it. And we are how many months in? Not that long into this war. It’s now as unpopular as the Iraq War was after three years, during sort of the height of the insurgency. So this is a problem of Republicans’ own making. And I’ve said this about Iran for a long time—when they constantly fear-mongered and put out all these hawkish statements and policies about how Iran was a country we could never negotiate with, Iran was the ultimate threat to the United States. Look, Iran does a lot of bad things, but it’s not an existential threat to the United States. This is the consequence of all of those decades of rhetoric, that they pushed a president who is deeply erratic to undertake a war of choice that has had disastrous consequences in the region and, in the United States, for the global economy—that we warned would happen if they did it. And now they have no way to get out of it. And they are led by a man who I think has zero concept of the actual reality on the ground.Sargent: How does this resolve itself? The president clearly will not end this unless there’s an ending that he can describe as a world historical triumph that outdid what Barack Obama did in the Iran nuclear deal that you were a part of. And so that’s not going to happen, right? Iran’s not going to give him those things. So what happens? How do we get out of this?Harf: Iran is not going to give him those things. That ship has sailed—the day Donald Trump ripped up the previous Iran nuclear agreement. I think if we can get to a place where there is some sort of agreement on the Strait of Hormuz, that will probably end with Iran making money. It will be open, but Iran will probably charge a toll, which is money in their pockets. If we can get to a place where somehow the existing enriched nuclear material is secured, if we can get to a place where Iran is not sending missiles into the region—basically sort of a ceasefire plus. If we can get to that, I think that is the best they can hope for. Because as long as Donald Trump is president, the Iranians, I think, feel like they have quite a bit of leverage. And anytime America or Israel—they blame us for everything Israel does too, fairly or unfairly—steps out of line, they can close the strait in what, 24 hours? So that’s the best I think we can hope for. This disastrous policy will have consequences that last for a generation. And there is no easy Iran deal to be had now. There is no magic wand that we are going to be able to wave, in the best-case scenario. And this is far from the best-case scenario.Sargent: And it seems that maybe the only way out of this, other than the one you’ve outlined—which is a tough road—would be that Democrats take back the House and possibly the Senate and use their power to grind this thing to a halt and defund it if necessary. Now, I don’t know if Democrats will do that, but they certainly should. How do you see that piece of this playing out? Is that a possibility?Harf: I think if Democrats can take the House and the Senate, it would be very helpful. I have no faith or confidence that this administration would actually end the war if Congress did something to try to stop it. This will be very interesting if Democrats take Congress—subpoenas, investigations, defunding ICE. There’s a whole bunch of priorities that I think the Trump administration right now is figuring out how to circumvent if Democrats take the House and the Senate. But I think that we have to try, because Americans are dying. We are spending trillions of dollars, and we are less safe today. And our friends and allies are less safe today because of this. I think it will take a new president, quite frankly, to really end this era of American military adventurism, whether it’s in Venezuela or Iran or elsewhere.Sargent: Well, that sounds like it’s the size of it. I guess we shouldn’t have elected a madman, huh?Harf: No, this is what happens when you elect a madman who is drunk on power. You get a paramilitary roaming American cities, killing American citizens, and you get this hyper-hawkish U.S. military going around the world looking for places to intervene, because they think that’s how you advance American power—at the end of a gun. And it’s like all of these people who fought in Iraq and who now are in the Trump administration learned nothing from the Iraq War. Because we are in an even bigger mess today, with no way out of it. And this is what happens. This is the consequence of Republicans not taking him seriously enough and using him for their own aims. You can’t control him, it turns out.Sargent: Well, the Iran nuclear deal that was negotiated by Barack Obama told the opposite story: that negotiation and patience is what’s required, and that’s the real exercise of American power. But since that was done by Obama, Donald Trump had to rip it up. And we’re here. Marie Harf, thanks so much for coming on. That was bracing stuff.Harf: Thank you.

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Thirty years ago, on a not very special episode of Friends (“The One With Frank Jr.,” for the record) Ross and Rachel swapped “Celebrity Freebie” lists: top fives of famous people with whom they would each choose—and be allowed by their partner—to have consequence-free sex. Ever the culture vulture, Ross opted for Isabella Rossellini, leading to the most incongruous Blue Velvet shout-out in prime-time history. Rachel, meanwhile, chose Chris O’Donnell, John F. Kennedy Jr, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sting, and, in a shocker, ex–Hardy Boy Parker Stevenson. The heart, it has been said, wants what it wants. David Wain’s new film, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, turns on an egregious no-strings-attached mishap, complete with a cameo from the erstwhile Ms. Green. The setting is Wilbur, Kansas, all picket fences and strip malls, where former high school sweethearts Gail (Zoey Deutch) and Tom (Michael Cassidy) are set to be wed. She’s bubbly and sweet, beloved by her neighbors and beauty parlor clients; he’s gormless and visibly out of his depth. Both are seemingly happy to go through the motions till death do them part. Pregaming an author event at their local bookstore, Gail and Tom start hypothesizing about their celebrity freebies; since the writer in town for the signing is Jennifer Aniston—there to hawk a no-frills cookbook of “Sensible Suppers”—they both agree that she’d be a suitable fantasy fling. Cut to Tom in flagrante delicto a few hours later in the back of the store with America’s Sweetheart. “We talked about this,” he pleads to Gail, who’s mortified, as is Jennifer, which doesn’t stop her from arranging to send Tom some DVDs of Friends (he only knows her from The Morning Show). Heartbroken, but determined to get even on her own set of ethical terms—and egged on by her standard-issue sassy best pal, Otto (Miles Guttierez-Riley)—Gail puts her game face on. Otto is off to Los Angeles for a hairdressing convention and suggests she tag along. Their target: Jon Hamm, a handsome prince ensconced at the Chateau Marmont.No sooner have Gail and Otto landed at LAX than they’ve caught a cab ride with Richard Kind, obtained some star maps, and learned about the best spots in town to get a burger (McDonald’s), a coffee (Starbucks), and a blow job (Foot Locker). They also accidentally obtain the briefcase of a reigning Mafia queen bee (Sabrina Impacciatore) who has designs on bringing down the global financial system and is willing to kill the strangers who’ve made off with her documents. Other impediments to Gail’s righteous carte blanche booty call include misfiring hitmen, unctuous personal assistants, and a machine-gun-toting “Weird” Al Yankovic, who helpfully tells her and her friends to “eat it” while chasing them off his property.David Wain does not make realistic, or even halfway plausible, movies. This laxity is his badge of honor,  and he wears it well. Suffice it to say that Wain, who once cast Aniston opposite Paul Rudd in 2012’s Wanderlust, does not make realistic, or even halfway plausible, movies. This laxity is his badge of honor, and he wears it well. Where a status-climber like Judd Apatow cultivates a strenuous, and largely disingenuous, naturalism—John Cassavetes by way of SNL—Wain has no use for respectability. He’s yet to abandon the slovenly, see-what-sticks shtick of Wet Hot American Summer (2001), an epochal work that has informed a swath of postmillennial alt-comedy. By sticking to his guns—and also letting them misfire, or shoot blanks—Wain runs the risk of seeming like an inept veteran, when he’s actually an old master of his very particular chosen form. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is not a good-looking movie: Kevin Atkinson’s cinematography is so hypnotically bland that Main Street USA and the Inland Empire become virtually indistinguishable from one another. The performances are broad to the point of active mugging; the storyline doesn’t so much strain continuity and credibility as leave them to bleed out in a ditch. This is all to the good. Wain and his co-writer, Ken Marino, who appears as a veteran paparazzo helping Gail navigate the City of Angels, have each worked on plenty of “normal” television and streaming series since their days on MTV’s The State. They’ve had successful careers meeting the industry halfway—especially Marino, who’s usually the funniest part of whatever he’s in. What they refuse to do is make compromises on their own time. Instead, they play a game of (rubber) chicken with themselves and the audience, torquing artificiality and contrivance into its own screwily lucid sort of worldview: a wryly complacent gaze into the pop-cultural abyss. Wain is often called a satirist or a parodist, which is true for instance of the winking, ruthless Nora Ephron–esque They Came Together (2014), which leaves vintage rom-com tropes to ripen and rot on the New York City pavement. The label doesn’t always fit, however. “I don’t consider Wet Hot American Summer a spoof at all,” Wain told The Film Stage; “it’s just a movie really sourced in actually going to summer camp, and it’s funny.” The skeleton key to unlocking the director’s sensibility—not that it’s necessarily airtight in the first place—might just be Wet Hot’s gee-whiz, summer-stock metaphysics—the wholesome, theatre-kid excitement of getting your friends together and putting on a show. Think of the wonderfully sincere sequence where a group of preteens perform “Day by Day” from Godspell, an almost enchanted interlude that feels plucked from memory. And then there’s the final act of Wain’s deceptively conventional and Apatow-adjacent 2008 masterpiece Role Models (co-written with Marino), in which the protagonists are finally reconciled by a rousing game of Medieval cosplay—an immersion in nerd culture enacted with a welcome lack of condescension toward characters and audience. It makes sense that such an inveterately playful filmmaker would finally get around to riffing on The Wizard of Oz: Victor Fleming’s 1939 classic is the primal scene of Hollywood escapism, after all. The sheer slack-jawed obviousness of the references here is part of the point: “Gail Daughtry” inverts “Dorothy Gale” as surely as “Otto” scrambles “Toto,” and Hamm eventually refers to himself as a wizardly “man behind the curtain.” Within the film’s Emerald City framework, John Slattery, playing a B-list celebrity, serves as a modern version of the Cowardly Lion (“Put ’em up, put ’em up,” he mumbles, shadowboxing in his garage). Ben Wang, playing a Creative Arts Agency rookie, is a scatter-brained Scarecrow manqué, and Marino as the cynical, heartless photographer has shades of the Tin Man. Slattery’s performance is wonderfully unhinged; he’s funniest when he’s being used as a punching bag, whether rhetorically—as in an uproarious series of text messages narrating his incremental estrangement from Hamm (who’s left his buddy on read for several years)—or literally, as when he gets a hotel room door slammed on his ankle 34 times, each jolt punctuated by its own piercing yelp of “Ow!”There is a fine line between liberated and lazy, and Gail Daughtry refuses to pick a lane on principle.David Lynch used to suggest that most of his movies were spiritual remakes of The Wizard of Oz, and Wain’s embrace of low-rent surrealism can feel Lynchian at times; by following a guileless ingenue through a freaky version of “Hollyweird,” Gail Daughtry becomes the director’s Mulholland Drive, right down to the script’s winking anxiety about the perils of show-business-as-usual. There aren’t a lot of comedy directors who are so willing to deal in outright alienation effects, like the repetition-compulsion of Slattery’s battle with the door, or the gratuitously brutal violence of a late action sequence seemingly staged in one of the same locations as Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And then there’s the narrator, played by the honey-voiced character actor Fred Melamed, who starts out cheerful and folksy about Gail and her friends but begins wearying of the WTF nature of the material around the same time we do. Melamed’s descent into raging dyspepsia is a signal that Wain knows very well he’s wasting his—and our—time and trusts that we don’t mind. There is a fine line between liberated and lazy, and Gail Daughtry refuses to pick a lane on principle. The swerving is the point; the pleasure resides in the high-minded notion—rooted in the golden rule of improv—that all jokes, including and especially the bad ones, are created equal. It’s hard to reconcile deliberately half-hearted humor with real emotion, and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is deliberately underwhelming both as a love story and as an attack on the culture industry. Wain loves his offhand anticlimaxes; no surprises for guessing that, choosing between a cheating dork on the one hand and Don Draper on the other, our heroine finally chooses herself. But Gail’s parting words sum up the movie, its makers, and their passions so nicely that they bear repeating. “Let’s keep it loose and freaky,” Deutch tells Hamm before they float off together in a hot air balloon, somewhere over the rainbow.