Michael Wiser: The thing that was remarkable to us was the fact that Donald Trump very much ran on a peace president. It was something that he said over and over again that he was going to end wars, to not begin wars. It was something that appealed to a lot of his supporters. It was something that his vice president, J.D. Vance, said was crucial to him supporting Donald Trump. And one year into his presidency, what we saw was almost an escalation in conflict. Starting with a number of smaller incidents like attacking the Houthis, strikes on the Iranian nuclear program, ramping up against drug boats in Venezuela, going and seizing Nicolas Maduro, and then of course, starting a war with Iran.
And the question in the film that we wanted to address was how did that happen? How did the candidate who ran on being a peacemaker, on being a president who was not going to get involved in foreign wars, whose political rise had in a lot of ways come because of his opposition to the endless wars after 9/11, to his opposition to the war in Iraq. How had he become a president who is very comfortable and seeking out conflict around the world?
Patrick Center: From the research that you've done and the number of interviews that have taken place, what do you find? When does that switch take place? His followers believe that he's the no more foreign wars president and yet we're seeing this projection of power. What has happened?
Michael Wiser: One of the interesting things that we found was that Trump always had an impulse to use power in this way. And that what really changed was the people around him.
In his first term, we did see some military action tended to be much more limited than something like seizing Nicolas Maduro or starting a direct war with Iran and a number of people who were around him acted as constraints on him. And in the second term, what you've seen over the course of the year is a president whose becoming more and more comfortable with using force, more and more comfortable with starting wars and that the people he's chosen to have around him, we title the film The War Cabinet, that that war cabinet around him, although they come from different places, although some of them are against these kinds of interventions, none of them are going to act as a break on what he wants to do on his efforts to show his own power, to show the power of the United States to engage in these conflicts. And in a lot of cases, the team that's around him has acted as an accelerant for him. As a team that's not going to stand up to him and say, this is a bad idea, Mr. President, but a team that's going to say, you're the president and we're going to find a way to make this happen.
Patrick Center: If we could focus on the decision to go to war with Iran, that lead up, what does it look like? As you mentioned, the cabinet is fairly pliable. What advice do they give? Are they giving advice?
Michael Wiser: There is a definitely a range of opinions inside the team of the president's advisors. There are a number of people who do issue warnings. One of the strongest individuals inside the war cabinet issuing warnings was the vice president, J.D. Vance, whose political career had very much been built on his opposition to the endless wars after 9/11. He had served in the military. He campaigned on the fact that Donald Trump was a president who was going to end these wars and he warned the president that his base would not be happy with starting a war like this.
But at the same time, Vice President Vance and the others around the president also made it very clear that if you make this decision, we will be there behind you. We will be there behind you to support you rhetorically. We will be there behind you politically. So, despite the concerns that some inside the cabinet had, and in particular, J.D. Vance, they made it clear that if the president decided to go forward, that they were going to be there for him.
And this was a president who had little doubt at that point about that fact that these operations would be successful. He'd had a string of operations, such as hitting the Iranian nuclear program a year before, where he had been warned about what the consequences would be. He'd undertaken the extraordinarily risky raid into Venezuela to seize its president, Nicolas Maduro. And those operations, in his view, had turned out well. And he believed that this operation, which was actually a war against Iran, was also going to similarly turn out well, despite the warnings that he received from his advisors.
Patrick Center: You talk about the warnings from advisors. The current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is Air Force General Dan Caine. How much impact is he having in this decision-making?
Michael Wiser: Caine very much sees his role, according to people that we've spoken to, as purely a military advisor, as someone who gives options to the president, as someone who says, is the worst-case scenario, but at the end of the day is there to follow the directions of the Commander in Chief.
Inside the White House, a lot of people that we spoke to, including some who served in the first term, believed that the Pentagon, that the military was often dragging its heels on things that the president wanted to do. That it resisted efforts, for example, to send troops into the streets in 2020 in response to the Black Lives Matter protest, that it said it had legal problems and erected other roadblocks. And everyone on this team, from the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, down to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, understands that in this administration, there's an expectation that when the president makes a decision that you're there to execute it. So while he was planning and providing some cautions and warnings about what could go wrong in Iran, and indeed, many of those things did happen, at the end of the day, the American military and the Defense Department, which the administration calls the Department of War, was going to go along with whatever the president decided.
Patrick Center: Do you investigate the short-term and long-term strategies?
Michael Wiser: I think with Trump, that question of strategy, of what is the final end goal is a little bit complicated because Trump very much looks at each of these situations as a transaction, as something that's happening in a particular moment. He's focused on whether he's a winner or loser. He's been like that throughout his entire career. And so, when he's looking at something like Iran, I'm not sure if it's right to think about it in the terms of international relations and what is it going to be like in 30 years down the road.
It's better to try to understand it in terms of the way that Donald Trump approaches these kinds of decisions, which is what makes sense in that moment? What's the decision that's going to make him appear to be more powerful to, in his view, make the United States appear to be more powerful? And I'm not sure that there's as much discussion at the level of the president of what are the consequences five years, 10 years down the road, as much as they are, what's going to happen in the short term. Is this going to be a win for the president or not?
Patrick Center: We have decades-old alliances. Think of NATO. What has happened with our allies?
Michael Wiser: I think that's one of the areas where the president probably has kept his promises, where his rhetoric during the campaign has been consistent with the way that he's governed and where a lot of the people who are surrounding the president agree.
For decades, this president has said that America's allies are taking advantage of the country. He's been famously wary of NATO and our other alliances. And as he's conducted his foreign policy in this administration, he hasn't paid much heed to those allies. And of course, that has had consequences. That's had consequences with our alliances with Europe, with NATO, with others that we've relied on in the past that now don't see the United States as such a reliable ally.
But for people inside the administration that we've spoken to and people who are close to the administration, they don't see that as a bad thing. They see that as the president delivering on a promise.
Patrick Center: What do you want viewers to take away from this film?
Michael Wiser: I think that the focus of the film really is on the people around Donald Trump. We all know Donald Trump. We've been living with Donald Trump in our politics since 2015. Many of us are familiar with him from far beyond that. And what we set out to do in this film is to understand the people around him and the role that they play. People like Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, the people around the president who this time are making this administration a different one than it was in the first term.
In the first term, there was this term, the adults in the room, this idea that they were there to constrain a president who was new to politics, who was new to foreign affairs, that they were there to limit his impulses. And almost to a person, everyone who came into this administration knew from the beginning that that was not how they were going to operate, that they were there to help this president do what he wanted to do.
They saw him as the democratically elected leader of the country, and their role is more as an aide than somebody who was there to constrain them. And that's had profound consequences.
That's had consequences in all of these actions that this administration has made. And I think it really comes home in the Iran war where despite the concerns that many of them had, despite the fact that many of them, you put them under a lie detector, an administrative truth serum would probably say it's not the decision that they would have made. They saw their role as to not constrain or stop this president, but to enable the president to even go to war with another country in a situation where we are now, which is the administration trying to figure out a way to get out of it and dealing with the political consequences, the economic consequences, and very much trying to deal with a decision that could determine his entire second term and his legacy as president.
Patrick Center: Tonight at 10 o'clock on WGVU Public Television, Frontline presents The War Cabinet. Writer, producer, Mike Weiser, thank you so much.
Michael Wiser: Thanks for having me.