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IRGC: War May Extend Beyond Region if U.S. Attacks Resume; Study Shows Many Military Communities Becoming News Deserts; Trump Comments on DOJ Anti-Weaponization Fund, IRS Audit Prohibition; Trump Flexes Power Over GOP as Critics Ousted in Primaries. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired May 20, 2026 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[14:30:00]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is reportedly warning of a wider war stretching beyond the region if U.S. attacks resume.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: The threat follows President Trump saying he was on the verge of launching new strikes on Iran within an hour of it, but he postponed that at the request of a few Gulf nations. And he said this earlier today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We'd have to open the Strait. That would open immediately. So we're going to give this one shot.

I'm in no hurry. You never think, oh, the midterms, I'm in a hurry. I'm in no hurry.

I just, ideally, I'd like to see a few people killed as opposed to a lot. We could do it either way, but I'd like to see a few people killed. I just wonder whether or not they have the good of the people because some of the things they're doing to me means they don't have the good of the people and they have to have the good of the people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Let's talk about this now with Nate Swanson. He was former director for Iran on the National Security Council. He's currently the director of the Iran Strategy Project at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative.

All right, Nate, as you're looking at this, the president keeps making threats, backing off of them. Where are -- where is this? Where is the situation right now in this war?

NATE SWANSON, FORMER DIRECTOR FOR IRAN, WHITE HOUSE NSC: Yes, you can only do this so many more times before it becomes counterproductive, right? You can't walk up to that ledge of conflict and back down. Otherwise, Iran at this point won't take it seriously. And so you're kind of at the point where you have to get something, whatever that is. I think it's probably as simple as getting something on the Strait of Hormuz and then just moving on.

SANCHEZ: I wonder what you make of the threat from the IRGC to broaden the conflict if the U.S. and Israel resume strikes. What exactly does that mean, you imagine?

SWANSON: Well, I think Iran is doing two things.

[14:35:00]

One is they're just, you know, saying that this will be costly, right? So if the U.S. escalates, they're prepared to, I think, really go after targets that they left on the table before, right? They threatened to go after more MRA targets, things that might be closer to Trump personally.

So I think that is what Iran is trying to project to dissuade the administration from going this perspective. But I also think it is probably a recognition on their behalf as well that, like this situation long term, is unsustainable. There needs to be some progress moving forward.

And I, you know, so it's trying to move away from the military option.

KEILAR: If they can actually move away from that big military confrontation and, as you say, maybe get something in an agreement on the Strait of Hormuz and then move on, how does that actually look like a success? I mean, the military operations have been successful. They've met their objective.

And yet we see the limitations of that. How could just getting something on the Strait and then moving on and not actually addressing the issues that they went to war with be a success?

SWANSON: Well, from whose perspective? From an American taxpayer perspective, you know, maybe it's success in that your gas prices go down, right? And so it's less of an immediate impact.

From the administration's perspective of going through this war, I don't know. It's harder to explain. And but if you're a Gulf nation, you want this nation to -- you want this war to end so you can start exporting oil. So you're probably desperate to get this over with.

And you know, in Iran, I think they're ready to move on as well. So it's a very, very low bar for success. But it's better than the current status quo for all parties.

SANCHEZ: There was really eye opening reporting in The New York Times today about an early plan after the war began by the U.S. and Israel to install former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran's new leader. The reporting indicates that he was injured in a strike that was meant to liberate him from house arrest. But then apparently, he got cold feet and didn't want a part of this.

There's no indication as to where he is now, is my understanding from the reporting. What do you make of that?

SWANSON: I mean, it's a remarkable report for two reasons. One is just, you know, most Americans actually know who Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was, right? He was the firebrand president that denied the Holocaust and was part of a reprehensible crackdown on the Iranian people in 2009.

But the part that probably most people don't realize is that he's kind of had a pretty significant reform over the last 13 years out of office where he's become really an anti-regime critic. And it was basically under house arrest now. So I mean, that's kind of a fascinating transformation over time.

But really the most important aspect of this story is just how ill- conceived the regime change plan was. You're not going to be able to, as interesting as Ahmadinejad may have been to the Israelis or Americans, you know, basically stage an air raid-driven jailbreak and somehow magically have him be the future leader of Iran. So it just kind of shows the huge gap between a concept of him being an anti- regime person and then somehow making him leader.

And there's just no explanation for how you got from A to B. So I find that remarkable.

SANCHEZ: A real surprise. Nate Swanson, thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

SWANSON: Thank you for having me.

SANCHEZ: Still ahead, another sign of President Trump's grip on power in the Republican Party as Congressman Thomas Massie loses his primary. What would this mean for the midterms? We'll discuss next.

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(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: On today's homefront, a crisis for many military communities as they become news deserts. That's an area that is no longer served by local media, making it tougher for residents to know what's happening in their hometowns. A nonprofit news organization focused on military issues called The War Horse studied this in partnership with Medill's journalism school. And what they found is really daunting.

Since 2005, military communities have lost 48 percent of their local newspapers. That is four times the national average. And since 2016, there's been a 40 percent decrease in the number of stories about military related issues.

Let's discuss this now with Thomas Brennan. He's the founder and executive director of The War Horse. And Zach Metzger, who's director of the State of Local News Project at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. Zach, first to you, can you just share a little bit more about what this study found about the state of journalism and local military communities? ZACH METZGER, DIRECTOR, STATE OF LOCAL NEWS PROJECT, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY: Yes, thank you for having me. It's striking how for these communities, they are increasingly journalistically left out of national conversations but also have fewer journalistic resources to keep them informed about what's happening around them.

A lot of these bases are major components of their local economies. They have hundreds of thousands of people living connected to the base itself. And so there's a lot of lives and a lot of money that depends on these people having good information about the decisions being made that impact them. And so having a lack of information can really pose a grave risk to those people's information access.

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KEILAR: And Thomas, you got your reporting start after you left the Marine Corps. You were at a local outlet covering Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Local reporting, of course, so important to bringing the water poisoning at Lejeune to the forefront in the fight for restitution for those veterans and others who were affected by that. How do you see these findings playing a role just more broadly in holding people in power to account and in uncovering systemic problems?

THOMAS BRENNAN, FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE WAR HORSE: Well, thank you again for having me. What I noticed from a boots on the ground perspective when I was working as a local reporter at Camp Lejeune when I first got my start was that these aren't just bases.

They're hospitals. They're schools that serve our military children. They're housing where our service members and their families live. So it's not just facilities.

It's the people that live there and the issues that impact them. And I left in 2014 to go to journalism school, and I was the last full-time military reporter covering that community. And so that means that for over 12 years now, there has been no watchdog journalism looking at some of the systemic issues that exist at that one base.

And because of my awareness of the rest of the journalism ecosystem, I know that Norfolk, Virginia, which is the largest Navy base in the country, has no military reporter. Fort Bragg, which is the largest Army base in the country, doesn't have a military reporter. So we're not just talking about bases that don't have coverage.

We're talking about the people, the men and women who serve this country and their families that have no representation in the media. And there's no real way to inspire change and accountability if those stories aren't being told.

KEILAR: Yes. And Zach, it's important to note. I mean, you, I think it drives it home.

You have thousands of people who are deployed right now. Why does that kind of drive home why these news deserts and military communities are such an important issue to discuss right now? METZGER: Yes. I mean, I think that lack of access to local news can kind of cut both ways. On the one hand, you have people in these communities, they lose an information resource.

Their family members may lose an information resource. They aren't getting information about decisions that impact them or their families, people being deployed. People within the larger community aren't being informed about those things.

And there's less of an accountability network to hold the decision makers to account. And at the same time, with those lack of information resources, those people are also left out of national conversations. And so military members, anyone part of the military community, becomes sort of a separate facet to society, if the rest of the country isn't being informed about them, isn't being informed about the realities of military life, there's less of an awareness of what is happening. And that has a lot of impacts on morale. It can have an impact on recruiting, on retention, on readiness.

But it also means that there's a large portion of society that has done a great sacrifice and continues to do a great sacrifice that is almost continuously being treated as an other because there's less of a, they're less part of the conversation.

KEILAR: Yes. And Thomas, you've noted that national level military reporting is also on the downswing. So that's also something to consider in all of this.

How do you hope that your outlet, The War Horse, fills some of this news desert? What are you aiming to do?

BRENNAN: Thank you for asking that. I think that there has been a lot of conversation about the bombs and the bullets and the arsenals and the ships and the different troop movements that have happened. But where I really hope The War Horse can step in and fill the void is by focusing on the human impact of these things.

We have had family members who were -- came under attack at the beginning of the war with Iran and had to evacuate the area with only the clothes on their back and the belongings that they could carry. And that's still a story that's largely untold.

And when I go -- I went down to a military spouse event down in Norfolk last week. And so many of them feel absent in the conversation. And honestly, they feel fearful of being able to speak out because they don't want retaliation against their families. So I really want The War Horse to be a home that can protect those sources and publish those stories that the American public needs to hear.

Because service members and their families are not getting the answers that they need. We're seeing record numbers of senior leadership being fired with disregard. And the chilling effect that that's having across the military means that somebody needs to be helping them tell their stories and keeping them safe while doing so.

KEILAR: Yes, they deserve that information. And so do all of us. Thomas, Zach, thank you very much for joining us on this. We certainly do appreciate it.

[14:50:00]

And I do want to go now to something the president just said moments ago from Joint Base Andrews addressing the issue of this IRS agreement and also this what some Democrats and some Republicans are calling a slush fund, almost $1.8 billion for those who feel that they have been the victims of weaponization of past administrations. Here's what he said just moments ago.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Have you ever spoken to people that are critical of your settlement over your IRS case about the tax now that you can't be prosecuted for tax?

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Yes, well, what happened is I was suing IRS for a lot of different reasons. One of the reasons is they released my tax returns, which you're not allowed to do now. They showed I pay a lot of tax.

I may even release my current returns because they show I pay a lot of money, but they're not supposed to do that. There were lockboxes as president. They were and they released them and a certain firm released them, which was, I guess, a private firm.

But it released them to a lot of the fake news. And the fake news went and -- you're just not allowed to do that. And many other things happened.

So I released them from the lawsuit and I guess they made a settlement of some kind. I wasn't involved in the settlement. I could have been involved, but I didn't choose to be. So they made a settlement.

Also, the anti weaponization of people. I mean, people were destroyed. They went to jail. Their families were ruined. They committed suicide.

You know, all the Biden administration and the Obama administration, both of them. I mean, the Obama administration started it. The Biden administration was horrible in terms of what they've done to people is incredible.

And we're getting -- we're reimbursing those people for their legal fees and for their costs and for anybody involved. But they destroyed people, people committing -- I read the other day a person committed suicide over it.

They went, you know, it was the most violent thing I've ever seen in politics, what they did. And yet if I say, oh, let's look at this one or that one, they say weaponization, weaponization. What they did in terms of weaponization will never be allowed to happen in this country again.

So we think that those people -- we think that anybody involved in that process should partake. And you're talking about peanuts compared to the value. It destroyed the lives of many, many people. Thank you very much.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SANCHEZ: We were listening to President Trump there at Joint Base. Andrew saying that he was not involved in the settlement of his DOJ lawsuit, one that now sees the U.S. forming a fund to compensate folks that the administration argues were unfairly prosecuted by the last administration, including people who rioted at the Capitol on January 6th.

Let's discuss with pollster and communication strategist Frank Luntz. Frank, full disclosure, we were originally going to talk about primaries, but I do want to get in a question about this effort with this fund, because some Republicans are pushing against it, even describing it as a slush fund. What do you make of the president's messaging here?

FRANK LUNTZ, POLLSTER AND COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGIST: I think that it's significant and it deserves your questioning. In the end, we all have to say enough. You should not be destroyed because you decide to enter politics.

People need to be held accountable for what they do or don't do, for what they say or don't say. And then I think they were just pulling ourselves apart. I know that I sound like a broken record because I've mentioned this before on your show, but it's all bad.

It's all problematic. And it's not OK if the Republicans do it. It's not OK if the Democrats do it.

Then we need to call an end to this. I understand that politics is a tough business. But you oppose people, but they're not your enemy.

And I believe that that's exactly what's happening right now and that we're going to be continuing to pull our country, our democracy apart. Look, we're celebrating our 250th birthday. There should be a time when Republicans, Democrats, independents, unaffiliated, that everyone comes together to say that our democracy is worth protecting, it's worth defending.

And yet I see the worst of democracy in evidence in our country right now. It makes me very sad.

SANCHEZ: So what do you make of the infighting among the Republican Party? And I'm specifically referring to President Trump going after Thomas Massie, for example, who lost his primary in Kentucky last night. And even John Cornyn, a Texas senator who is up for reelection, President Trump, after staying mum on who he would endorse, decided to endorse his rival, Ken Paxton, the attorney general there, even though Cornyn voted with Trump 99 percent of the time, voted to acquit Trump during both impeachments.

[14:55:00]

Why do you think Trump decided to endorse Paxton? Why is he going after some of these rivals inside his own party?

LUNTZ: And we can't forget the Indiana local races, the state Senate races, which is very rare for a president to come in on something five out of seven were defeated. His effort to defeat successfully Senator Cassidy of Louisiana. We've never had a president more active in his party than President Trump.

And he is the king of the hill. He's the big kahuna. And what this says is that if you run afoul of Donald Trump as a Republican in a primary, you're going to be defeated.

And I see this and I think as a pollster, as someone who studies elections, I think this is significant. This is not an endorsement of his policies. This is an endorsement of he himself.

So he says, I want candidate A to get elected. You can make -- there's no doubt that that candidate is going to win a Republican primary. The challenge for the president is what happens in November, because he can elect all these people in these primary situations and he will.

But will those people be viable in November? I see the Republicans having serious troubles in the House, increasing troubles in the Senate. I think that it is more likely than not that Democrats win the majority in the House.

And so he needs to be focused not just on who the Republicans nominate, but if the president is to be successful, it's the general election that matters most.

SANCHEZ: Frank Luntz, always appreciate the time and that stellar Marlins jersey. I love that, man. Thanks so much for joining us.

A new hour of CNN NEWS CENTRAL starts after a quick break.

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