Or anywhere else.
The Strait of Hormuz remains a pivotal flashpoint in the U.S.-Iran conflict — an ace card that Tehran repeatedly plays to hedge against American power. At the recent Group of Seven summit in France, President Donald Trump praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for remaining “neutral” during a peak in U.S.-Iran tensions, suggesting that Beijing showed […]
Trump’s claims that ‘vandals’ are to blame don’t hold water so far – key US politics stories from Monday 22 JuneDonald Trump is claiming – without providing evidence – that the sorry state of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool weeks after a $14m renovation is the work of “vandals”.On Monday, Trump was adamant it was not the pool company to blame for the algae blooms and peeling paint, instead pointing to five people arrested for vandalism and five more are under investigation. Continue reading...
Today, Bloomberg's Mike Mckee remembers Alan Greenspan and reflects on his legacy as Fed Chair. Then, David Lebovitz, multi-asset solutions global strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management, discusses current Fed Chair Kevin Warsh and the overall economic landscape with more eco data to drop this week. Plus, Bloomberg Opinion's Therese Raphael on UK Prime Minster Kier Starmer's decision to step down. Then, Jennifer Welch, chief geoeconomics analyst at Bloomberg Economics, discusses the status of talks between the US and Iran as oil begins to flow through the Strait of Hormuz. Finally, Silvio Tavares, CEO of VantageScore, shares an exclusive report of the state of the US consumer as borrowers adjust to inflation and higher rates. (Source: Bloomberg)
Following an oval office signing event where President Trump signed two executive orders intended to speed up the implementation of Quantum Computing within the U.S. Government, President Trump took questions from the assembled press pool on current events. The Q&A begins at 16:24 of the video below (prompted): . Posted in media bias, President Trump, […] The post President Trump Takes Questions from the White House Press Pool appeared first on The Last Refuge.
A conservative commentator argued that President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, instead of seeming all-powerful, are instead appearing to the world as “impotent.”“The state of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is a sort of moron-populist version of Chernobyl,” wrote The Dispatch's Nick Catoggio on Monday, referencing the Soviet Union’s infamous mishandling of a nuclear power plant leak in Ukraine in 1986. “In both cases, the government’s incompetence and corruption created a vexing ecological problem. And in both cases, the government undertook to cover up its culpability in the matter.”After adding that the nuclear meltdown in 1986 was more consequential than the Reflecting Pool’s algae growth in 2026, Catoggio noted that the Reflecting Pool crisis occurred because the White House valued cronyism over competence.“Instead it awarded a no-bid contract for a quick fix to a firm owned by a Trump donor—except that the quick fix, applying sealant to the pool’s bottom, didn’t solve the issue of water leaking between the concrete slabs,” Catoggio wrote. “Days after the renovation was finished, the pool had more algae in it than at any point in June over the last five years.”Despite using hydrogen peroxide and “advanced nanobubbler technology” without killing the algae, Catoggio argued that Trump made himself look worse by blaming saboteurs without basis instead of his own ineptitude for the blue sealants cracking and being ripped off in chunks.“Former Fox News talking head turned U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro dutifully vowed zero tolerance for pool-peelers,” Catoggio continued. “And she meant it: One man arrested by Park Police on Friday claims he did nothing more than touch a piece of floating debris before the cuffs were slapped on. At last check, armed members of the National Guard had been hastily deployed to stand watch over a basin that’s now almost as green as the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day.”Yet Catoggio concluded that the fundamental problem facing Trump is his own inability to get things done, whether in cleaning up the Reflecting Pool or winning the war he waged against Iran.“Between the war on algae and the war abroad, Trump has never looked more pitifully impotent than he does right now,” Catoggio wrote. “The perfect metaphor for his first year back in office came when, without warning, he demolished the East Wing to make way for his precious ballroom. That episode captured the political zeitgeist of 2025: Americans had elected a caudillo who cared not a bit about the country’s civic traditions and would bulldoze them—literally—to get what he wanted, whether the other branches liked it or not.”He added, “The reflecting-pool idiocy is the perfect metaphor for his presidency in 2026, coinciding as it does with our national humiliation in Iran. Postliberalism promises effective problem-solving through energetic authoritarianism, but as things stand, not only can’t the authoritarian in chief forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz, he can’t even successfully clean a public pool in D.C. The zeitgeist has flipped.”This is not Catoggio’s first harsh critique of Trump and his administration. Earlier this month he noted that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, despite being ostensibly as right-wing as Trump, refused to kowtow to him — and that this further reflects his waning power.“After 10 years of degrading bootlicking obeisance by the president’s many courtiers, it was startling to see someone who needs a relationship with Trump assert her dignity against his insults,” Catoggio said regarding Meloni’s harsh reply to Trump’s insistence that she “begged” him to “take a picture with him.”When Meloni rebuked Trump by saying that neither she nor Italy begs for anything, Catoggio commented that “casually demeaning someone because he bears them a grudge is as instinctive to Donald Trump as applying bronzer or bloviating about ‘strength.’”He continued, “But those who need to stay on his good side — like, say, every Republican official in the country — are doomed to follow the Ted Cruz career arc between 2016 and 2021, broadly speaking. That is, if Trump insults your wife, you find a way to let it slide and salute when he asks you to help him stage a coup.”Meloni refused to play along, though.“And so the prudent, if pathetic, thing to do when an imperious postliberal goblin insulted you was to bite your tongue,” Catoggio wrote. “Not Meloni, though. She’s had enough.”
President Trump escalated pressure on Iran with fresh threats as confusion continues over whether the Strait of Hormuz is truly open and whether peace talks are making any real progress. We break down the latest diplomatic twists, Vice President JD Vance’s negotiations, and the ongoing Israel-Lebanon complications hanging over a potential deal. Meanwhile, Trump says...
Right-wing Trump ally Abelardo de la Espriella has clinched a narrow victory in Sunday’s runoff presidential election in Colombia, defeating leftist Senator Iván Cepeda, an ally of current President Gustavo Petro. De la Espriella ran a fearmongering, “tough-on-crime” campaign, promising to build mega-prisons inspired by El Salvador’s authoritarian President Nayib Bukele, to bomb “narcoterrorist camps” and to abandon Petro’s peace efforts. His reported victory is also a win for U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration is waging an intensifying “war on drugs” across Latin America, targeting left-wing leaders like Petro with false allegations and threats of military intervention. “De la Espriella clearly represents a criminal approach to politics: lying, propaganda, coordination and collusion with criminal narcotrafficking, restriction of rights, and money laundering,” says longtime Colombian activist Manuel Rozental. With his victory, says Rozental, “We expect to have military operations and a U.S. intervention within the country. We expect to have human rights abuses. We expect to have militarization. And it’s all for the extraction of resources and the link of drug trafficking to the U.S. government, U.S. interests and global mafia.”