From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv
The Meltdown
One day that captures how Trump has gone from
unpredictable to chaotic
By Jonathan Lemire and Russell Berman
A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what
should have been a joyous occasion. The last-
minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill
signing in favor of yet another push for doomed,
unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with
members of his own party followed by sneering
remarks about some of the nation's oldest allies.
And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it
right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial
Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but
on knife-wielding vandals ... and maybe Barack
Obama.
And that was just yesterday.
For President Trump, things aren't going great. He
normally thrives in chaos, reveling in
unpredictability to keep his opponents off-
balance. But right now, he's just flailing.
Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing
how to control the national conversation and
quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the
consequences of a war with Iran that increased
prices for Americans and weakened the country's
standing in the world. Trump's poll numbers have
plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout.
Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to
defy their president. Trump, whose political image
revolves around strength, finds himself
diminished.
At this time roughly a year ago, Trump had
overwhelmed Washington. He had slashed taxes,
launched trade wars, angered longtime
international allies, cracked down on border
crossings, and eviscerated the federal government.
The Democrats struggled to slow him down; Trump,
meanwhile, openly mused about defying the
Constitution to run for a third presidential term
in 2028. On July Fourth, he punctuated the frenzy
by signing a far-reaching and expensive piece of
legislationuwhich he dubbed, in typical Trumpian
fashion, the One Big Beautiful Bill Actuat an
outdoor White House ceremony complete with a
flyover by the B-2 bomber that had just clobbered
Iran's nuclear facilities.
But as this Independence Day approachesuas the
nation celebrates its semiquincentennialuTrump is
unable to control the political narrative about a
war that did not go the way he had hoped. A
memorandum of understanding signed last week
extended a shaky cease-fire and led to an initial
round of negotiations involving Vice President
Vance. A host of issues remains, including the
fate of Iran's uranium-enrichment program and its
control over the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations
could take many months.
Read: Trump in defeat
This is not something that Trump wants to hear.
He's been bored of this war for a while, and in
the West Wing, there was a race to be done with
it. Allies have told us there are also quiet,
behind-closed-doors doubts: What, exactly, did the
conflict accomplish? Few, if any, of the
president's goals were achieved. Iran could close
the strait again. Yet Trump has frantically tried
to spin this as a victory, even as he walks away
from some of his stated objections. He has taken
to Truth Social repeatedly this week to defend the
deal and once again seethe about comparisons with
the agreement that Obama struck more than a decade
ago. Trump continued to waffle as to what could
come nextueven suggesting a resumption of the
bombing campaign if Iran does not comply, a threat
that few take seriously. His attempts at
unpredictably were quite predictable, and Iran has
proved itself to be anything but cowed.
Still, many in Trump's orbit tell us that they
believe the war won't have much political staying
power. Their focus, at least for now, is not the
long-term ramifications on the Middle East or
America's international relationships, but rather
the political moment ahead of the midterms. They
hope that the war will be soon forgottenuthat the
strait will reopen, that the price of gas will
fall, that bombs will not need to fall again.
Aides pointed us to a number of major events,
including a series of Supreme Court decisions and
even the World Cup, that could eclipse the war in
the national consciousness. "The midterms are
months away, " one official told us. "We'll have
lots of plot twists by then. "
But so far, Trump's efforts aren't working. And
when his frustrations exploded yesterday, he
lashed out against senators who have faithfully
served himuand whose support he can't afford to
lose.
Tensions between Trump and Senate Republicans have
been building for months. The president irked
party leaders by endorsing a primary opponent to
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who lost his
bid for a third term. Trump then infuriated them
by snubbing Senator John Cornyn of Texas in favor
of his scandal-plagued primary challenger, state
Attorney General Ken Paxtonua move that appeared
to seal Cornyn's doom in last month's primary
runoff. Senate Majority Leader John Thune had
strongly backed Cornyn, a former member of the
Senate GOP leadership, and the party's campaign
arm had spent millions of dollars to boost his
candidacy before Trump undercut them.
Senate Republicans gave Trump much of what he
wanted last year, but he now faces some resistance
as the GOP's prospects in this year's midterms
worsen. Egged on by loyalists such as Senator Mike
Lee of Utah, Trump has tried to jawbone
Republicans into scrapping or circumventing the
filibuster's 60-vote threshold to pass legislation
known as the SAVE America Act, which would require
people to provide proof of citizenship when
registering to vote and photo identification when
casting their ballot. (It would also, in some
versions, significantly curtail voting by mail. )
Republicans have never had a majority that
supports eliminating the filibuster, and Trump's
refusal to accept that reality has frustrated
senators.
On top of all that, Trump's efforts to force
members of his own party into retirement have
created what's become known as the "YOLO Caucus"
in the Senate, as Republicans such as Cassidy,
Cornyn, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina (who
announced his retirement immediately after
declaring his opposition to the One Big Beautiful
Bill Act last year) have felt liberated to oppose
and criticize the president in ways they would not
have if they faced reelection. Tillis, in
particular, has trashed some of Trump's ideas and
appointees with a newfound zealuhe called Bill
Pulte, the acting director of national
intelligence, "an incompetent sycophant. " And
Cassidy decried the administration's deal with
Iran as "the worst foreign policy blunder in
decades. "
The intraparty feud came to a head yesterday, when
Trump abruptly canceled a ceremony to sign a major
housing billua rare example of significant
bipartisan legislationuand demanded that
Republicans first pass the partisan SAVE America
Act if they wanted his approval. Things devolved
from there. During a meeting with Senate
Republicans in the Capitol, Trump berated them for
allowing (through a combination of defections and
absences) the passage of a resolution seeking to
constrain his ability to wage war on Iran. Cassidy
confronted him over the deal he had struck, and
the two got into a loud argument in which Trump at
one point reportedly told the senator to sit down.
"I make no apologies for standing up to the
president, " Cassidy told reporters afterward. "I
am sticking up for the American people, even if
I'm speaking to the president. "
Naturally, Trump proclaimed the whole thing a
success anyway. "We had a really great meeting, "
he told reporters. "We like our leader. We like
our party. We like, really, everybody in the
roomuI don't like a few people, but that's okay.
" The president was flanked by three of his
loyalists: Senators Rick Scott of Florida, John
Barrasso of Wyoming, and Lee, all of whom wore a
Trump-style red tie. Thune stood to the side, his
blue tie appearinguintentionally or notulike a
small declaration of independence. By nightfall,
the friction between Trump and Senate Republicans
seemed to ease a bituat least for the moment. The
chamber took a symbolic revote of the war-powers
resolution and defeated it. Two Republicans
flipped their votes; one of them was Cassidy.
White House officials pointed to that as a sign of
Trump's continued hold on the GOP.
When we reached out to the White House for
comment, the spokesperson Taylor Rogers responded
with a list of the president's accomplishments and
added: "President Trump is the leader of the free
world, and thanks to his bold leadership, the
United States of America has never been stronger.
"
In the face of these struggles, Trump has
continued to try to create his own reality. He
returned to the White House from the Hill for a
meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
Yet even as Rutte lavished him with praise, Trump
took the moment to attack some of NATO's key
members for not helping with the Iran war, and he
unleashed particular bile on Italy as part of a
diplomatic spat that began when the president
claimed that its prime minister, Giorgia Meloni,
had "begged" him for a photo at the G7 summit last
week. Meloni denied that, which infuriated Trump.
But Trump was far angrier about something closer
to home. As part of his expansive effort to remake
Washington in his own image, he took on a project
to fix up the Reflecting Pool. What he got instead
was an on-the-nose metaphor for the state of his
presidency: a no-bid contract to a crony that went
over budget, ended in failure, and resulted in the
pool being policed by federal troops. The pool's
liner has come apart, and the water has turned a
brilliant, stubborn greenufar from the "American-
flag blue" that Trump intended. But rather than
take responsibility, Trump has veered into
conspiracy theories.
He has, predictably, turned America's birthday
into a commemoration of himself. Plans for a
concert on the National Mall to kick off the
festivities turned into a pro-Trump rally, and
most of the music acts backed out once they
realized how partisan the event had become. Trump
went ahead anyway, making himself last night's
centerpiece with a few C-listers as his opening
acts. But his heart didn't seem in it as he
delivered a short speech that included some nods
to the republic's founding and plenty of
grievances. He spoke from behind bulletproof
glass, and the crowd was small by Trump's
standards. Social-media footage showed many people
leaving while he was still speaking.
Trump, ever attuned to what is trending, posted on
social media today that he had a massive crowd and
that "everybody stayed right until the end of my
Speech. " He did not weigh in on the day's
breaking news from the Middle East: Despite the
cease-fire agreement, Iran fired upon a vessel
trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz, which
underscored the challenges that lay ahead in
negotiations. Try as he might, Trump can't change
the subject.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/06/trump -congress-iran-midterms/687704/?gift=SCYx-5scVta3- cr_IlgTyXop4lbJx_FaAQABu93hp9o
--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2