Divides over what GOP priorities should be ahead of this fall's midterm elections are testing the relationship between President Trump and Senate Republicans.
President Donald Trump claimed Iran pledged that it will not pursue any tolls or charges of any kind through the Strait of Hormuz, and that negotiations would end if it did. “Iran has informed the U.S. that, despite troublemaking Fake News reporting to the contrary, there are ‘NO TOLLS, NO INSURANCE COSTS, & NO OTHER […]
One of President Donald Trump's longtime biographers, Michael Wolff, is warning that the obsessive focus on the Reflecting Pool reveals something much deeper about the 80-year-old leader. Speaking on the Daily Beast podcast, Wolff explained that, according to his sources, Trump is spending as much as 80 percent of his time on things like the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. Chatting with those he said are close to Trump, Wolff said that the Reflecting Pool failure is drawing "All of his anger, all of his rage, all of his demands — and now his need for vengeance: someone must be responsible."The pool disaster has largely been a joke online, with mocking memes and comedy ranging from social media accounts championing the pool algae, along with "make algae great again" merchandise. For political analysts, it is described as a metaphor for Trump's entire presidency: big promises, overspending and, ultimately, a failure to deliver. Trump is seeing it all as "an insult to the country and a challenge to him personally," Wolff said. “The discussion that I’m having with people is that, you know, 60, 70, 80 percent of his time — and remember, he doesn’t work that much — is devoted to the Reflecting Pool,” Wolff explained.“But he is focused on the Reflecting Pool,” Wolff told the Beast. “Now we can obviously make a little nod here to Narcissus and his reflecting pool... It is, even for people who work with Donald Trump every day, a weird moment.”Co-host Joanna Coles was curious whether the obsession stems from Trump's image of himself as a "builder."Wolff questioned if it was “one of those dementia things.”"I'm against diagnosing people," he explained. "But you know, Jesus, for anybody who has seen this before, and I have seen this before and so many people have.""You close out the rest of the world and you just and you focus on these problems which are, which are really minor, and you turn them into obsessions."I mean, this clearly has become, in his mind, and hence in the White House, an obsession," he added. "What is the largest problem in the world today? It is apparently the Reflecting Pool.""... I think he obviously has signs of dementia," Wolff corrected. "I'm just not comfortable with moving that to a diagnosis. I mean, you have that guy on 'Doctor John Gartner.' He says that because Trump's been in plain sight for so many years, you can actually diagnose the decline of his language, which is key to understanding someone's mental state. That's what all television doctors say."Coles said that it's the first time she's heard Wolff acknowledge that Trump may have such a problem. Wolff explained that what can be confirmed is that "something is unusual. Something is not as it should be. Something is weird. The president of the United States of America, in all kinds of crises, which again, larger and larger, has chosen for the past week and a half at least, to focus almost exclusively on the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. That's odd, is it?"
Installation of Independence Day safety measures was deployed early due to the “increase in vandalism by leftist activists” in and around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. In […]
Senate Republicans are preparing to push ahead on next year’s government funding bill without Democratic buy-in, with the stalemate threatening to fracture the historically bipartisan spending negotiations right from the jump. An Appropriations Committee meeting to move the first four of 12 bills forward had been canceled twice earlier this month as Republicans and Democrats…
Top Senate Republicans have a message for President Donald Trump: This is not working.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 24 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 is claiming that Iran has fully agreed to high-level international inspections of its nuclear program. Iran is flatly denying this. As always, under Trump, it’s more likely that the truth is coming from the other side of the negotiating table and not from our side. This highlights a big problem for Trump. He badly needs to produce results in these talks very quickly. He needs more money for the war, but as an angry exchange he had with a reporter reveals, the public won’t put up with that when they’re so sour on his economy. It’s gotten so bad that even Fox News is telling him the truth about his terrible economic numbers.So he needs to produce results in Iran fast. But as international relations professor Nicholas Grossman argues in a good new piece, time is not on his side. So we asked Nick to come on and explain it all to us. Nick, always good to have you back on.Nicholas Grossman: Yep, great to be here, Greg. Thanks.Sargent: Can you quickly sum up where we are on this fundamental dispute, Nick? Trump says Iran has agreed to high-level international inspections, and he’s even telling reporters that he wouldn’t have agreed to enter the talks at all without Iran agreeing to that beforehand. But all signs are that Iran has not agreed to it. What’s the story here?Grossman: I think it’s pretty simple, in that Trump is lying, or at minimum heavily exaggerating and bullshitting. It’s possible that they brought this up as something that Iran could maybe agree to in principle, or suggested it. But all the signs show that there really hasn’t been any discussion of Iran’s nuclear program yet. There probably won’t be, since Iran has more leverage in these talks. And that sort of thing would take a lot of details, a lot of the specific things that require nuclear physicists and engineers and other experts—there’s no way they could have possibly worked it out now. So simply, Trump is lying or trying to play up a minor, maybe discussion point as a big concession.Sargent: Can I ask quickly before we move on from this, Nick—does Trump saying this undermine JD Vance? Is this a problem for JD Vance in these negotiations?Grossman: It’s a big problem. I don’t think we’ve seen something like this before, that the president of the United States is actively lying about what is going on in the discussions. And that makes it very hard for Iran to be able to get their sense of what the United States is committing to. Just to make a deal—if I’m going to do something, I expect you to do something. There are usually trust-building measures. We take a few steps along the way.And so if I say, OK, I’ll do X as long as you do Y, and then as soon as you get up from the table, the president says, no way, we’re never going to do Y, and I never would have agreed to that in the first place—then I can’t know what you’re going to do. I can’t do my trust-building steps, and it makes the negotiations very difficult. So the Americans are in this weird position where they have to say, pay no attention to what our national leader says, he’s just doing that as theater for domestic consumption—even as the Iranians can see the way that Vance and the whole Republican Party and a lot of conservative media kiss up to him so often and just go with whatever he says. So yeah, it greatly undermines America’s negotiating position.Sargent: So Trump is under immense pressure right now to deliver. Let’s listen to an exchange he had with a reporter who asked him about the news that the Pentagon has asked Congress for another $80 billion for the war. The reporter starts out by saying the Department of War has asked for this money. Listen to what happens.Reporter (voiceover): The Department of War is asking for 80 billion more dollars for the Iran war. Do you think Americans support this at a time when so many are financially struggling?Donald Trump (voiceover): “Who are you with?”Reporter (voiceover): I’m with NewsNation, sir—Trump (voiceover): Not a very good group. Not doing very well. Not only do they support it—not only do they support it, they demand it, because they won’t allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. You want to see trouble, let them have a nuclear weapon. We’re doing very well with Iran. They’ve been decimated.Sargent: Nick, note how angry Trump gets at the notion that the American people are turning on him over both the war and the economy. And of course, the American people have turned on him over both. But he says the American people absolutely support spending $80 billion more dollars on the Iran war.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is set to meet with House Budget Committee Republicans Wednesday, an important meeting that comes as Republicans race against the clock to advance a third party-line spending bill. Republicans only have seven working days left before the House leaves for a weeklong recess for the 4th of July. Upon the […]