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War Consumes Mideast As U.S. Allies Fend Off Iran Attacks; Trump Denies Israel Pulled Him Into War, Says U.S. Forced Israel's Hand; Trump Says Iran "Too Late" For Talks As War Expands; Texas Primaries Set Stage For High Stakes Senate Showdowns. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired March 03, 2026 - 12:30   ET

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

[12:30:00]

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: The U.S. embassy in Beirut is closed after Israel struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. The State Department is also warning Americans in more than a dozen countries to get out. But with many commercial airlines suspending flights, Americans might not have very many options to flee.

Let's go now to Jerusalem Bureau Chief Oren Liebermann in Tel Aviv. So, Oren, the President said that they have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no air detection, and yet the missiles keep coming from Iran.

OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN JERUSALEM BUREAU CHIEF: Well, Dana, Iran has prepared for this moment pretty much since 1979, the chance to fight the United States, the chance to fight Israel. It's not a coincidence, perhaps, from that perspective that you hear and have heard the chants on the streets there from pro-regime Iranians, death to America, death to Israel.

This is the (INAUDIBLE) even after the U.S. and Israel have carried out four days of punishing strikes targeting ballistic missiles arrays, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the military, the Navy, the intelligence headquarters, Iran will still, and potentially for quite some time now, be able to carry out strikes.

Israel believes it may be limited, that is, Iran may be limited in the amount of missiles it can send this far that get here after taking out a lot of the launchers, but quite clearly Iran (INAUDIBLE) vast array of drones and shorter range ballistic missiles, and that's what we're seeing as basically Iran lashes out at countries around the Gulf and has hit many of them, if not, at this point, all of them.

BASH: And when it comes to what Israel is doing, we saw Israel launch a series of strikes against Iran again today, including bombing the compound of the group that will pick Iran's next leader. What more do we know about that, about who was there?

LIEBERMANN: We're still waiting for more details about the strike itself, but this occurred earlier today in the Iranian holy city of Qom, and that's where Israel carried out a strike targeting the site that is the seat for the clerical power of Iran's regime. And according to an Israeli official familiar with the matter, the goal of this strike on what's called the Council of the Assembly of Experts compound in the city of Qom was to essentially take out the 88-member senior clerical council that was, Israel believes, meeting to elect, to vote on, and to assemble and pick the next Iranian supreme leader.

This was Israel's (INAUDIBLE). Iranian state media said that the building itself had been evacuated before the strike, so it's unclear whether there was or was not anyone in the building. Those are part of the details we're waiting to learn here as the hours go by.

Israel has obviously shown the level of intelligence it has when it comes to Iran. But it's clear that Israel here, not only going for the current regime, but trying to disrupt and take out the mechanism that keeps the regime moving forward and decides the regime's future.

BASH: Yes. The President said that they had other people in mind and maybe some of those people are dead, so perhaps they're going to go to the next tier. That's effectively what he said.

Oren, thank you so much. Appreciate that reporting.

Now I want to go to our International Diplomatic Editor, Nic Robertson, who is in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Nic, the U.S. shut down three embassies in the region. Tell us more.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Yes, and there's a threat, an imminent threat, of missile and drone strike at the U.S. consulate here in Saudi Arabia in the east of the country, in Tehran. The embassy, of course, here closed down.

The consulate in Jeddah on the other side of the country is in a shelter-in-place instruction, as well. And drones actually hit the U.S. embassy here in Riyadh last night. So the perception from here is that these embassies, while they appeared to be at such a distance from Iran, didn't appear to be sort of in an imminent threat environment.

Iran has signaled by these attacks and it's -- and the way it's being perceived here, these calculated and escalatory attacks on an escalation ladder, where Iran still has space to go even higher on this level of escalation because they've just used drones, for example, against the embassy here, against the Saudi military bases here, against the Saudi oil refineries here, that they can still escalate further using missiles, using ballistic missiles. So that remains a concern.

But the perception here is that the calculation has to be, now, does Iran have command and control in position? And the answer to that is yes. And, therefore, how to respond, to get drawn in deeper into the war or not. But for U.S. citizens in this country, it is very, very clear.

[12:35:03] The warnings are quite stark, particularly in the east. There is a threat imminent. Don't go to the consulate. Stay at home and shelter- in-place. And I think if you'd asked people a week ago if this would be the outfall of U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, that Iran would be targeting the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, that would probably not have appeared as an immediate outcome. The reality is, it has been.

BASH: Yes, Nic, there obviously had pre-planned to bring in other countries in the region, particularly those like Saudi, where you are. And Kristen Holmes here was just reporting from her sources that this has surprised the administration as much as it has surprised people in the leadership of the country where you are.

Nic, thank you so much.

We have much more on the latest on Iran, and also it is Election Day in Texas. We'll be talking about that as well. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:40:41]

BASH: Moments ago, President Trump denied that Israel forced his hand in Iran.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I might have forced Israel's hand, but Israel was ready and we were ready. And we've had a very, very powerful impact because virtually everything they have has been knocked out now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: Now, why was he asked about this, and why is this a big deal? Because of what the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARCO RUBIO, SECRETARY OF STATE: There absolutely was an imminent threat. And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us. And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.

Because the Department of War assessed that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked and by someone else, Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths. We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage. Had we not done so, there would have been hearings on Capitol Hill about how we knew that this was going to happen and we didn't act preemptively to prevent more casualties and more loss of life.

(END VIDEO CLIP) BASH: David?

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Yes. I mean, when Secretary of State Rubio came out and said that yesterday, it had already been like, you know, 72 hours of some mixed messaging going on in the administration. But yesterday was a day from the Hegseth presser in the morning to the President's comments in the East Room, where he laid out those four key principles.

Then we got to Rubio later in the day and an entirely new rationale got injected into the argument out of nowhere, which set sort of alarm bells off, especially inside the President's base about, you know, concern that Israel was dictating all of this. So much so that you saw Netanyahu go on and say, oh, no, Donald Trump's his own man and does this. Obviously, now in the Oval Office, Donald Trump is course correcting here.

The one thing I think that where you saw Trump and Rubio -- Trump today and Rubio yesterday, agree is this notion, if we're looking for rationales as to why now, that as Donald Trump just said in the Oval, Dana, beyond the nuclear issue, the compiling -- the piling up of missiles and ability in Iran, and this is what Rubio said yesterday, was getting so large that they could have basically what would have been immunity from attacks. That they would have been so well prepared.

And Trump said the same thing in the Oval. That seems where they are singing from the same sheet about a reason also as to answering the question of why now. And that was Rubio painting a picture because a year from now may be too late.

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes. And they call -- they actually -- I had a White House official call me yesterday to clarify President Trump's comments of, you know, the last and best chance. And they specifically pointed to timeline, which was President Trump realized there was going to be no negotiation. And so if that's where your starting point is, you've got to go in immediately because -- and every day that passes is a day that the Iranian government gets stronger.

BASH: And let's just cut through and say out loud and specifically why this whole divide over, did Israel force the U.S.'s hand or not, is a thing. It's not just because of many different rationales, which is part of it, but it's also because there is a very small, very loud part of the MAGA base that have megaphones and podcasts, who are -- have already been saying very publicly that they think that this is all about the U.S. following Israel as the U.S., you know, tries to figure out the policy going forward.

I'll just give you some examples. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has not -- who's no longer in Congress, but she still has a big following, "We're now a nation divided between those who want to fight wars for Israel and those who just want peace." Matt Walsh, who is a prominent podcaster, "He's flat out telling us we're at war with Iran because Israel forced our hand," and it went on and on and on. Then on the other hand, you have Trump saying to Rachael Bade, a reporter here in Washington, MAGA's with me. This is not about whether or not MAGA is not with me. "I think that MAGA is Trump. And MAGA loves what I'm doing -- every aspect of it." And so far, the polling backs him up.

[12:45:06]

DAVID WEIGEL, POLITICS REPORTER, SEMAFOR: Sure. MAGA contains multitudes. I think you're on -- polling at CNN founds. But three quarters Republicans agree with the strike. There are Republicans who were against this up until the moment it happened and have reformulated their rationales to say the President's right to do this.

But, one, Bibi Netanyahu's vision for the Middle East is different than Donald Trump's. He's -- he does want, and he has wanted for his entire political career to replace regimes to remake the map, to have a peaceful secular government in Iran that can deal with Israel. That Trump sailed to -- in all three of his campaigns was that he was going to make deals so we didn't have to worry about it, very explicitly that we would not have to go to war.

And Matt Walsh, the people that you're talking about, the American Conservative magazine, they believe that. You saw some of this flashing last summer with the strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.

BASH: Right.

WEIGEL: The debate I saw among conservatives and MAGA conservatives, nationalist conservatives, was over whether Trump is proving that we can have a light touch, help out Israel, and get out of there without casualties. They were very confident, the more pro-Israel conservatives, that that could happen last summer, that every day, every hour this goes on, they're losing market share, let's say, in the MAGA movement to the people saying, you did not run on this. We want to focus on our hemisphere. Weeks ago, that was the plan.

BASH: Yes.

WEIGEL: What happened?

BASH: Yes. And again, right now, in the White House, politically, they feel like they are in an OK shape because people who love him follow him and they will agree with what the President says. He was asked in this Oval Office meeting just a short while ago what the worst case scenario would be. Here was his answer.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who's as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen. We don't want that to happen. That would probably be the worst. You go through this. And then in five years, you realize you put somebody in who is no better.

(END VIDEO CLIP) HOLMES: Yes, I mean, that is a really bad scenario and one that a lot of people have been questioning why there wasn't more coherent of a plan moving forward in terms of knocking out the leadership. What comes next? Now, we've heard, you know, this reporting that they're looking into these militias that are on the ground, but that does not seem like a leadership strategy.

That seems like a stopgap to try and build a coalition within Iran. So what actually is next for a leadership if you have killed all the leadership, but you also don't necessarily want to put boots on the ground and that is --

BASH: Yes.

HOLMES: -- something we've been asking and have no answers to.

CHALIAN: Which is why you heard the German Chancellor, I think, say we're here to discuss the day after.

HOLMES: Yes.

BASH: Yes.

CHALIAN: Yes.

BASH: And just real quick, he also -- the German Chancellor also said very clearly that they are suffering economically because of the war, which is certainly not something that the President wants to hear, but it is a reality.

CHALIAN: And I think he wasn't just talking about Germany, I think he was --

BASH: No.

CHALIAN: -- talking about both countries, right?

BASH: Yes, yes.

CHALIAN: And the President did that thing where he said, you know, prices may go up for a little bit for people at the pump.

BASH: Everybody stand by. Coming up, voters are casting the first election day ballots of this crucial midterm year. Could tonight's results shift the fight for control of the U.S. Senate? That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:52:57]

BASH: Happy Election Day, everybody. It is the midterm primary season kicking off today. Right now, voters are headed to the polls in Texas, North Carolina, and Arkansas. Both Democrats and Republicans are really focused on the Lone Star State. There are crucial Senate primaries on both sides of the aisle that could reshape the battle for control of Congress in November. My panel is back now. David Chalian, I just want to set the table here with how much money is being spent. It's a lot of money across the board, but nobody even comes close to John Cornyn, the incumbent Republican senator, trying to keep his job. I mean, just look at that. It's not just him. It's also pro-Cornyn groups, but it tells you so much about the state of play right now.

CHALIAN: Yes. I mean, this is what adds up to the most expensive Senate primary in U.S. history, and you are right to note that John Cornyn or pro-Cornyn money. I mean, that an incumbent Republican senator who was in leadership needs that to get through a primary, possibly, is astounding.

And it just shows the change in the Republican Party, no doubt, and also the fact that he has an opponent who is just much more identified with where the sort of fuel --

BASH: Yes.

CHALIAN: -- inside today's Republican Party is in Ken Paxton.

BASH: Well, here is -- yes, here's one of the opponents, Ken Paxton, who said on social media this morning, tomorrow -- excuse me, yesterday, "Tomorrow we show John Cornyn, he can waste whatever amount he wants, but unlike him, Texas voters can't be bought." And of course, it's him and also Wesley Hunt, the Republican congressman.

WEIGEL: And I think a little bit what Paxton's doing is calling the bluff because how much -- the conservative movement, turning point action groups like that are already angry that Republicans are spending money in Texas that they might need in Michigan. They might need it in a push state or to defend Alaska. This is a 10-week runoff that every Republican expects John Cornyn to be faced into.

BASH: Yes, and we do -- that's exactly right.

WEIGEL: Yes.

BASH: So we do -- with the three-way race --

WEIGEL: Yes.

BASH: -- there is a high expectation that the way that the Texas election system works that there will be a runoff with the top two.

[12:55:10]

WEIGEL: Right, and that's -- that is what Paxton, I think, is saying between the lines, is do Republicans really want to spend another $100 million with everything else going on to beat me? I, in Texas last week, found it's just hard to convince Republican voters who do -- cannot -- did not have a recent member of a Democrat winning, even when there's a lot of media hype, as there is around someone like James Talarico, they don't have a member of a Democrat winning.

Telling them that Ken Paxton, who won three races for attorney general when he was outspent, when he was indicted, when he was impeached, member George P. Bush ran against him on the premise that he couldn't win the general, and he won. And so, a lot of confidence I found among Texas conservatives, and confidence that they're going to challenge Dan Crenshaw down the ballot, who Ted Cruz endorsed the opponent of, that they are going to continue remaking the party.

Because last year's elections in Texas, Republicans who impeached Paxton, this is one of the issues Cornyn (ph) talks about, many of them, most of them, lost their primaries, where voters are more aligned with Paxton.

BASH: Yes.

WEIGEL: The party's trying to convince them that they're wrong.

CHALIAN: On the money, though --

WEIGEL: Yes.

CHALIAN: -- that you're saying, which is so spot on, Cornyn's argument is, spend the money now.

WEIGEL: Right.

CHALIAN: This -- the argument to Trump, right? Like, get involved, endorse me, shut this down, because we're going to spend this money now in the primary season so that you don't have to spend it in the fall, because Paxton is a less Republican nominee from Cornyn's point of view. He's trying to -- he's going to try to make that argument inside the Oval Office to Donald Trump during this runoff period as to why he should get involved.

HOLMES: And they have made that office -- they have made that plea already to him to try to get him to endorse. He obviously has not endorsed in this race. He does have relationships with all three men. And of all three men, he actually identifies least with Cornyn, but he obviously has his own former campaign manager advising Cornyn, Chris LaCivita.

But there is also an entire other voice of people in his ear saying, we're never going to lose Texas. Like, they say this every time. They keep telling us it's going to be a purple state. I promise you, no matter who's out there, we're going to win.

BASH: Yes.

HOLMES: Now, whether or not that's true --

BASH: OK. So that will depend on who --

HOLMES: Right, of course.

BASH: Well, a lot of things, including who the Democratic --

HOLMES: Right. BASH: -- candidate is going to be, which is the other race that voters are going to the polls on today. We're talking about Jasmine Crockett, who is a sitting U.S. member of the House, and James Talarico, who is a state politician. Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JASMINE CROCKETT (D), TEXAS SENATE CANDIDATE: For the longest, they've tried to convince us that Texas is a red state. I have been explaining for a very long time that Texas is a voter-suppressed state, as well as a state in which voters just aren't very motivated.

JAMES TALARICO (D), TEXAS SENATE CANDIDATE: We can transform this broken political system. They may have the money, but we have the majority. It's going to require that we bring people together across these manufactured divisions.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: In the whole sort of race to figure out how Democrats move forward, this is one of the first tests. We saw some in 2025 and in some of the special elections, but this is the real first test of two really different approaches.

WEIGEL: Yes. And in Texas, I was finding Democratic voters almost universally like both candidates. They associate Jasmine Crockett with a very effective to them way of fighting Republicans. I had multiple voters tell me they just would love to see her in debate because she'd take Ken Paxton apart with her receipts.

And they thought maybe they have a relative who votes Republican who would like James Talarico. That was the wrestling they were doing. In some ways, this is less bitter than some Democratic races are going to get. There are races turning on people's support for Israel, turning much more on identity.

It is more about, do we believe that Jasmine Crockett is going to tap into a frustration with Donald Trump that will boil over in November, or do I -- do we -- there are Republicans somewhere, the people who that we're just talking about in Texas, who we always think are going to come over, who don't come over.

And I think she, in the last week of the campaign, was losing that argument. If you look at the turnout, you look at suburban voters coming out, Democrats do think they're coming out more for Talarico. But moderate Democrats -- and Talarico is not necessarily a moderate -- they're very worried about losing the imprimatur of fighting.

If they -- and what does fighting mean? It might mean just getting into awkward fights with Republicans where you're using four-letter words. Even if you don't win that, Democrats increasingly associate that with authenticity and with effectiveness compared to, let's put out a letter saying Trump needs to come back to Congress to vote on something.

A lot of frustration with process that I'm finding with Democrats -- BASH: Yes.

WEIGEL: -- which I didn't find two or four years ago.

BASH: Strongly worded letters --

WEIGEL: Yes.

BASH: -- do not fly right now. But that question of fight, what does that mean and --

WEIGEL: Yes.

BASH: -- who represents fight.

CHALIAN: And it's why Talarico is trying to redefine for himself what his version of a fighter is.

WEIGEL: He's fighting corporations, he's fighting corporate owners of media.

CHALIAN: Exactly. You know, that whole top-to-bottom thing -- you know, top versus bottom thing.

HOLMES: I just am very excited. I think this is like a really fun one to start the entire midterm season with. I mean --

WEIGEL: Yes.

HOLMES: -- it's fun on both sides, it's a lot of intrigue, so it'll be great to see.

BASH: Yes. It sure is.

Thank you all. Appreciate it. Thank you for joining Inside Politics today. CNN News Central starts right now.