Rick Rosner On, 18: Trump, Climate Change, Drone Warfare, and Iran
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/08/05
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss Donald Trump’s declining approval, MAGA conspiracism, antisemitism on X, and the political risks surrounding the next United Nations secretary-general. They also examine Europe’s extreme heat, wildfire and drought pressures, demographic projections, American missile shortages, Ukraine’s drone warfare, and the strategic limits of a possible United States ground campaign against Iran. Rosner contrasts expensive precision weapons with drones and recalls Iraq’s failed invasion of Iran, with lasting consequences.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So nice to see you again. I’ll say that I am still alive in Kiev. I hope you’re doing well in Los Angeles, and I hope the kiddo and her hubby are doing well in jolly old England as well.
Rick Rosner: I got a wet drive back from Hoover. It’s an upright carpet shampooer rig. It was very cheap. I’ve been cleaning our carpets. We have very old carpets in the house, and they’ve been peed on a lot, mostly by dogs. So that’s what I’ve been doing.
It’s almost exactly 13 weeks until the U.S. midterms. Trump says crazy crap every day. His party is at serious risk of losing the House in the midterms. There’s desperation from him as he tries to figure out ways to fuck with the elections, many of which would face legal challenges, and some of which the courts have thrown out or may throw out. Luckily, he’s dumb, so a lot of his plans to fuck with things do not work.
Anyway, with regard to Trump’s approval, he could go into the midterms with one of the lowest approval ratings of any president at that point in the election cycle since presidential approval polling began. Harry Truman had an approval rating of about 33% around the 1946 midterms, a year after World War II ended. Along with the end of the war came the lifting of many wartime price controls. The government did a ton of controlling domestic prices during the war, and everybody was largely on board with that.
There was meat rationing and gas rationing. Everybody had ration books full of coupons that you would turn in at the grocery store or gas station, showing that you were entitled to this much stuff. Then many of the controls went away. When price controls were lifted in 1946, prices went freaking crazy. Inflation surged and, at its postwar peak, was considerably higher than the inflation that pissed everybody off under Biden.
So Truman’s approval was about 33%. Trump’s approval is currently in the mid-to-high 30s, depending on the poll and polling average. I’ve noticed a pattern in the descent of Trump’s approval. It’s scalloped. Bunting is where you hang up stuff like a popcorn chain on a Christmas tree, or American flag bunting, the long ribbons on the Fourth of July. Bunting has points where it’s anchored. In between the points, there’s a little curve, right? That’s what Trump’s approval does.
On average, it declines, but it declines in a scalloped way. It declines, briefly comes up to a point, then declines again, and swings up to a point every few months. That’s just what it looks like when you look at the chart of his approval.
One reason could be that Trump does something shitty and everybody’s like, “Oh my God.” His approval drops. Then people get used to it, become habituated to the badness, and the decline in approval levels out. People just get used to it, and then it even starts inching back up again. Then he does some crazy crap again, and it goes into another cycle.
Another reason is that some pollsters regularly produce results that are much more favourable to Trump than the broader polling average. If two or three of those Trump-friendly polls all hit at the same time, that’s enough to make his approval jump. So some of it’s artificial. Some of it’s just a cycle of disgust with Trump. But once you see the scallops, it becomes a little easier to predict where he’s going to be. So there you go.
Another thing is that we’ve had 10 years of Trump now. He was elected in 2016. Among the general population, more than one in five American adults experiences some form of mental illness in a given year. Most of those conditions are not spectacular illnesses like schizophrenia. They’re more often conditions such as depression or anxiety.
After 10 years of Trump, I think MAGA has a much higher percentage of people who hold delusion-like or conspiratorial beliefs than the general population. I’m using “delusion-like” politically here, not as a clinical diagnosis. Depending on the question and the poll, substantial percentages of Trump supporters share false beliefs. For instance, many Republicans continue to believe that the 2020 election was rigged or stolen. That does not mean they’re mentally ill. It means they share a political belief that is not supported by the evidence.
A significant minority of MAGA supporters also believe that COVID vaccines commonly kill people. So there are a bunch of false or conspiratorial beliefs widely held within MAGA. You can hold beliefs like that because of your politics, your media environment, or your social group without having a psychiatric disorder.
But I believe, and there really haven’t been decent studies establishing this, that a higher percentage of MAGA supporters may now have actual mental-health problems. I don’t know what the figure would be. Of course, I see the loudest MAGA people on Twitter. That’s where you go to make noise.
But it’s a problem for the country. I’m sure that, on the other end, among the fringiest parts of the left, the rate of mental-health problems or conspiratorial thinking may also be higher than average. But I guess what I’m saying is that, thanks to the pervasive messaging of 24-hour news and social media, more people now appear trapped in distorted information environments than when my dad was my age.
To draw an analogy with postwar Germany, the Allies occupied Germany after the war and carried out denazification. They abolished and outlawed the Nazi Party, removed many Nazis from influential positions, and established procedures intended to distinguish major offenders from nominal members. But that didn’t mean Nazi beliefs immediately disappeared. A considerable number of people privately retained Nazi sympathies after the regime fell.
It’s not that they got fixed and quit believing Nazi shit. They learned to shut up about it, and eventually they got old and died. With MAGA supporters, there’s probably a lot of that shit that cannot easily be fixed.
Before we wrap up, Trump does serious crazy crap, and then he does things like this: over the weekend, he announced that he had won his 43rd club championship. Trump is 80. He said that he won the Senior and Super Senior Club Championships at the Bedminster golf club, which he owns, by shooting a two-under-par 70. That’s his account of it, and the result has not been independently verified.
There’s also footage from a previous round that appears to show one of his caddies moving his ball. Trump has faced longstanding allegations of cheating at golf, although he has denied them. Rick Reilly, a sportswriter, wrote a whole book about the allegations called Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.
So he says he has won 43 championships at his clubs. I don’t know, cheater-in-chief. Reilly argues that Trump’s claimed golf record is heavily inflated and that many of his victories have come at courses he owns.
Trump lies insanely. Over the weekend, he also pushed out AI-generated images showing himself as Elvis. It’s crazy crap, large and small. For the most part, his people are just like, “Yeah, that’s Trump being Trump.” But among the more fanatical segment, it’s not merely excused. It’s celebrated as Trump fighting for them and winning.
Jacobsen: The next news item is about the Security Council. It is planning a second informal straw poll on August 21 to narrow the field for the next secretary-general. Former Costa Rican Vice President Rebeca Grynspan emerged as the early front-runner in the first round of voting. She received 10 “encourage” votes, followed by Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett with nine. Grynspan has Jewish family roots. How do you think conspiracy theorists will take this one?
Rosner: Of course, there’s a whole language of antisemitism on X. You can be a “gnoticer,” spelled G-N-O-T-I-C-E-R. That’s somebody who claims to have “noticed” an alleged Jewish conspiracy to control the world. You can be a “fren,” F-R-E-N, an intentionally misspelled version of “friend.” A “fren” is somebody who is with you in your antisemitism.
Social media has contributed to this. Musk has repeatedly amplified or interacted favourably with white-nationalist and antisemitic accounts and claims, and X has become a much friendlier place for racism, antisemitism, and homophobia. Research has found major gaps in the platform’s enforcement against hateful material, although X’s written policy still prohibits repeated slurs and degrading stereotypes directed at protected groups.
You can report somebody for repeatedly using the N-word, and enforcement can be inconsistent or nonexistent. X may tell you that a post broke its rules without imposing a visible penalty on the account. People used to be suspended and, after repeated violations, kicked off. Now enforcement appears much weaker. I think we’ve talked about that before.
But anyway, on the one hand, there’s the rise of antisemitism. Was it three years ago now…? When Hamas attacked Israel?
Jacobsen: October 7, 2023. So, nearly 34 months ago.
Rosner: In the almost three years since then, Israel has prosecuted the war in Gaza in a brutal fashion, while the Netanyahu government has failed to prevent, and at times has enabled, violent attacks by far-right Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.
I hate the name “West Bank” because it’s confusing to people. It means the west bank of the Jordan River. The river forms much of the territory’s eastern boundary.
Anyway, the brutality of Israeli forces and the Netanyahu government’s tolerance of attacks by far-right settlers have legitimately upset many people who know about them, including many American Jews. They have also contributed to a further increase in antisemitism, although criticism of the Israeli government is not itself antisemitic.
So, if the United Nations appoints a Jewish woman as secretary-general, sure, conspiracy theorists will seize on it. But I would assume that, as secretary-general, she would also denounce Israeli policies when warranted. Regardless, I’m sure people will say there’s a conspiracy.
We don’t get a ton of UN news in the United States anymore. Maybe I’m not looking in the right place.
Jacobsen: Europe has been facing severe drought, heat, and wildfires, affecting agriculture and infrastructure across several countries. Romania is even blasting rock formations in the Danube to improve water flow near the Cernavodă nuclear power plant.
Rosner: Europe is getting cooked along with everybody else. My hometown, Boulder, recently reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a little more than 40 degrees Celsius. That matches Boulder’s recorded all-time high. It’s a little city tucked into the foothills of the Rockies.
In France, thousands of deaths have been associated with recent extreme heat. Europe has also experienced a series of record or near-record temperatures. Along with your country, Canada has had a ton of wildfires, as has the United States. Climate change is fucking with stuff.
It’s a gradual race against time to avoid the most dire consequences. Do the oceans eventually get so shitty that we lose most of the fish? I doubt we’ll lose most fish everywhere. The oceans are enormous. They cover about 71% of the planet. I assume there will still be stretches of ocean where fish can survive, although warming, acidification, deoxygenation, overfishing, and habitat loss could severely reduce marine populations. Coral is in greater danger because warm-water reefs are particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures.
Most of the help is still in the future, and it takes several forms. One is technology, including methods of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Another is using energy that makes less of a mess than fossil fuels. A third is slower population growth.
For several reasons we’ve talked about, people are having fewer children on average. But the global population is not currently projected by the United Nations to peak in the 2050s. Its latest central projection has the population reaching about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s and then beginning a gradual decline. Other demographic models project an earlier peak, but there’s still substantial uncertainty.
And instead of peaking at 11 billion around 2100, the latest United Nations projection has the population peaking at about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s. That’s hundreds of millions fewer people than earlier projections anticipated, which is a big deal. But the mid-2080s are still about 60 years away.
Things will get shittier over the next couple of decades. But there’s some reason for optimism that the shittiness will fall well short of any kind of apocalypse. Daily life will look somewhat the same.
I mean, on any given day, your life in 2038 may not look that different from your life now. But over the course of a year, there may be more misery. In Los Angeles, we had massive fires, which happen periodically, and we almost had to evacuate. So you may have events like that, where you have to run away from a fire.
Over the past couple of weeks, it got really hot in Los Angeles. Now that I’m a senior, I’m 66, both Carole and I had medical complaints that were unprecedented for us and seemed to be related to the heat. My mouth broke out in what looked like canker sores. My mouth got really fucked up. It may be that I’m not as tolerant of heat and dehydration as I used to be.
Carol got a super-killer, non-migraine headache. So, if we continue to live in Los Angeles, we can look forward to having more days when we have to protect ourselves from extreme heat. But that’s different from some kind of Mad Max shit where the government falls apart altogether because of climate change.
Jacobsen: Next news item. The United States has reportedly used virtually all of its available long-range precision missiles of two types during the war with Iran: the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, and the newer Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM. These long-range munitions cost roughly $1 million or more apiece, depending on the missile and how the cost is calculated, and they’re important parts of the American arsenal. Some other precision missiles, such as Tomahawks, cost several million dollars each.
President Trump is quoted as saying, “Our defense companies are, at this moment, making more munitions than they ever made before, in addition to expanding their plants and equipment at record levels.” Yeah, but it will still take years to rebuild some of the depleted stocks.
I just saw this, and it makes sense. So you’re in Ukraine, which is probably one of the world’s most experienced war-fighting nations right now, right?
Rosner: Yeah. Ukraine’s war effort is heavily drone-based. Ukraine manufactures millions of drones annually and deploys thousands of them every day against Russian forces. Ukrainian officials say that Russia has recently been suffering roughly 30,000 to 35,000 casualties a month, although battlefield casualty figures are difficult to verify independently. That’s around a thousand Russian troops killed or wounded each day. The Ukrainian government has announced a goal of raising Russian losses to 50,000 a month, not 50,000 a day.
This has implications for the United States in Iran. This kind of warfare would make a large American ground invasion of Iran extraordinarily difficult. So far, the United States has been fighting Iran primarily from the air, using missiles and aircraft. But the campaign has not forced Iran to accept the objectives Trump set when the war began.
The only way to compel Iran through direct military occupation might be to put a huge number of boots on the ground, not a small number. Estimates vary, but some analysts have suggested that a full-scale invasion and occupation could require somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 troops. There are no public indications that the United States is preparing an invasion on that scale.
Because Iran has developed extensive drone and missile capabilities, American troops on the ground would be exposed to some of the same kinds of threats that Russian forces face in Ukraine. That does not mean the situations are identical, but drones would make any ground campaign much more dangerous.
Even Trump probably isn’t crazy enough to mobilize for a full ground war against Iran. So we’re limited. I don’t know what would happen if the United States shifted more heavily toward drone technology instead of relying so much on extremely expensive missiles.
But you need to be relatively close for many kinds of drones. One reason Ukraine can use so many of them is that Russia has invaded Ukraine, so the opposing forces are right there. The United States is fighting Iran from a distance. I don’t know whether the United States could swarm Iran with short-range drones launched from bases 50, 100, or 200 miles away. Longer-range drones exist, obviously, but they have different costs, payloads, and vulnerabilities.
So maybe the Ukrainian model wouldn’t transfer neatly to Iran because the United States isn’t physically positioned along an Iranian front line.
One more thing. We’ve talked about this. In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran with a force of roughly 200,000 troops, supported by large numbers of tanks and aircraft. The war did not last six years. It lasted nearly eight, until 1988, and ended without Iraq overthrowing the Iranian government or achieving a decisive victory.
So even invading Iran with hundreds of thousands of troops, before modern drone technology, didn’t cause the Iranian regime to tip over. We’re stuck. We’re probably not going to force Iran to change its policies through air strikes alone, and a ground invasion would be enormously costly and uncertain.
Iran also has major oil-export facilities on Kharg Island, off its coast. Kharg is primarily an export terminal, not a giant refinery. Striking it could badly disrupt Iranian oil exports and further damage the world’s oil supply. Iran’s major refineries, including Abadan, are located elsewhere. I don’t know whether Trump has avoided Kharg Island for precisely that reason, but destroying its facilities could have major consequences for global energy markets.
I don’t think even that would change Iran’s behaviour or its unwillingness to negotiate.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rick.
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