From Gaza to Ukraine to Iran, Trump’s ‘peacemaker’ promise collapses
Joseph Gedeon
in Washington
A president who vowed to end global conflicts has instead presided over their escalation – his agenda is in disarray
In his inaugural address this January, Donald Trump declared that his proudest legacy would be that of “a peacemaker and unifier”, pledging that US power would “stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable”.
Five months later, his second presidency is witnessing the spectacular unraveling of that lofty aspiration.
A president who vowed to end global conflicts – including one which he said he would resolve within his first 24 hours – has instead presided over their escalation – most recently the spiraling conflict between Israel and Iran.
The timeline of the latest conflict resuggests a stark disconnect between Trump’s aspirations and reality: the wave of Israeli airstrikes came just hours afterTrump urged Israel not to attack Iran.
Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, took pains to describe the Israeli attack as “unilateral”, stressing that the US was “not involved in strikes against Iran” – only for Trump to then insist he had been well informed of Israel’s plans – and warn that further attacks would be “even more brutal”.
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who has emerged as Trump’s primary diplomatic negotiator in the Middle East and Ukraine, still reportedly plans to go to Oman this weekend for talks on Tehran’s nuclear program, but it appeared unlikely the Iranians would attend.
Trump’s muddled peace agenda was already disarray long before Thursday’s attacks.
The Gaza ceasefire his administration helped broker collapsed within weeks, with Israel resuming massive bombardments and imposing a three-month total blockade on humanitarian aid to the territory, where the death toll has now surpassed at least 55,000.
In Ukraine – a conflict Trump once bragged he would end on his first day back in office – Russian forces have pressed ahead with a summer offensive, entering the Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time in three years and accumulating more forces – evidence that Putin has no interest in Trump’s peace overtures and intends to expand the war further.
Meanwhile, Trump’s abrupt announcement of a ceasefire between India and Pakistan was met with fury in New Delhi, where officials denied his claims of brokering the deal.
And while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth acknowledged to Congress that the Pentagon has developed contingency plans to seize Greenland and Panama militarily, it’s unclear how territorial conquest fits into Trump’s definition of peacemaking.
His first term ended no wars, nearly sparked conflict with Iran, and saw his signature “peace” achievement – the Abraham accords – normalize relations between Israel and countries that weren’t fighting it anyway.
Part of Trump’s appeal to voters was precisely a promise to avoid foreign entanglements. In the stands at the inauguration viewing party, supporters told the Guardian how they valued his restraint in military deployment and favored his America-first approach that prioritized domestic concerns over international aid and intervention. And there is a an argument that for Trump peace is not an absence of conflict but rather Washington’s distance from it.
There is one potentially optimistic interpretation for the latest strikes in Iran. Alex Vatanka, the Iran director from the Middle East Institute in Washington, suggested that Israel’s attack could be a calculated gamble to shock Iran into serious negotiations. The theory holds that Israel convinced Trump to allow limited strikes that would pressure Tehran without triggering regime change, essentially using military action to restart stalled diplomacy. On Friday Trump suggested that the strike on Iran might have even improved the chances of a nuclear agreement.
“This is not likely to bring Iran back to the negotiating table,” said Andrew Borene, executive director of global security at Flashpoint and a former staff officer at the US’s office of the director of national intelligence. “It marks the opening of yet another rapidly expanding flashpoint within the global context of a new hybrid cold war, one that will be fought both on the ground and in the darkest corners of the web.”
Whether this strategy succeeds depends entirely on Iran’s response. The regime could either return to negotiations chastened, or abandon diplomacy altogether and pursue nuclear weapons more aggressively. Early indicators suggest Tehran may not be in a conciliatory mood after having its facilities bombed and leaders killed.
But even if the more optimistic readings prove correct, it does not change the broader reality: every major conflict Trump inherited or promised to resolve has intensified on his watch.
Trump promised to be a peacemaker. Instead, he’s managing multiple wars while his diplomatic initiatives collapse in real time. From Gaza to Ukraine to Iran, the world appears more volatile and dangerous than when he took his oath five months ago.
We feel the same about your troops occupying bases in the UK.
While Americans protest against 18th Century British imperialism...
First Palestine, then Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and now Iran.
When will it end?
Keep patting yourselves on the back and saying you're the nice guys.
And they've been in charge in America for quite some time.
In Europe, the ground is being prepared for another genocide
The genocide denial and Holocaust revisionism raging in Europe all point to the normalisation of genocidal violence.
On April 15, Austrian Nobel laureate Peter Handke was supposed to appear on Austria’s national broadcaster ORF to talk about his new writings. Instead, he proceeded to once again deny that the Srebrenica genocide happened, calling it Brudermord – biblical fratricide and framing it as a spiritual tragedy rather than a crime against humanity.
ORF stood by its decision to interview Handke when it faced criticism. It claimed that it had done nothing wrong since the interviewer acknowledged the genocide in a question.
That a European broadcaster would choose to platform genocide denial at this time is hardly surprising.
Europe faces a crisis not only of memory but of dangerous continuity. From the Holocaust to Srebrenica to Gaza, denial of state violence against marginalised groups seeks to erase past atrocities, normalise present ones, and pave the way for future ones.
Fratricide as ‘the worst crime’
The Bosnian genocide was the first genocide broadcast on television. In 1995, distressing images from Srebrenica filled living rooms worldwide, exposing the failure of international protection. Despite a lengthy process of prosecuting war crimes through the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and court decisions implicating the complicity of European peacekeepers in the massacres, denial of the Bosnian genocide continues to be well tolerated in Europe.
While Handke is by far not the only prominent public figure who engages in it, his rhetoric makes clear how this crime has come to be weaponised in minimising German and Austrian guilt for the Holocaust.
Handke portrays the Bosnian genocide as a tragic civil war between “brothers” – Brudermord. He romanticises war criminals as victims and embeds genocide denial in a fascist narrative of redemption through ethnic violence.
According to him, fratricide is “much worse” than genocide – ie, those who kill their “brothers” must be deemed worse criminals than the Nazis who killed “the other”. By framing atrocities this way, Handke effectively minimises the responsibility of Germans and Austrians for the Holocaust.
In this twisted narrative, the descendants of the Nazis can claim moral superiority, insisting they did not commit the “worst crime of all”- Brudermord. The chilling implication is that Jews were never truly “brothers” to Europeans like Handke.
Serb nationalists may see Handke as an ally in genocide denial, but he doesn’t defend them – he uses them. Through them, white Europe cleans its hands of its bloody crimes – from Auschwitz to Algeria, from Congo to Rwanda. Handke’s theological language is an alchemy of European conscience, shifting guilt onto the Muslims, the Jews, and the “Balkan savages”.
Transplanting anti-Semitism
Handke’s logic parallels and reinforces the broader campaign to shift the blame for anti-Semitism – and even the Holocaust – onto Arabs and Muslims. In Germany, this trend has been fully embraced by the state and various public institutions, which – against all evidence – have begun to claim that the immigrant Muslim community in the country is responsible for rising anti-Semitic sentiment.
In 2024, the German parliament, the Bundestag, passed a resolution stating that “the alarming extent of anti-Semitism” is “driven by immigration from North African and Middle Eastern countries”.
German media continues to fabricate a “Muslim Nazi past”, with one article claiming: “Unlike Germany, the Middle East has never come to terms with its Nazi past.” Meanwhile, state-funded NGOs have branded the Palestinian keffiyeh a Nazi symbol and echoed the discredited Israeli claim that the grand mufti of Palestine “inspired” the Final Solution.
Germany’s political establishment is now constructing a revisionist moral alibi: one in which Nazis are reimagined as reluctant, remorseful perpetrators, while Palestinians and their Muslim and Arab allies are vilified as more evil than the Nazis themselves.
For many years, this used to be a fringe idea adopted by far-right parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD). But now, the AfD’s core ideas, not just on Germany’s Nazi past, but also on immigration and Islam, have been widely adopted by the political centre.
This shift reflects a longstanding strategy of displacing guilt. Historian Ernst Nolte, celebrated by the conservative Konrad Adenauer Foundation with a major award in 2000, argued the Holocaust was a reaction to Soviet “barbarism”, relativising Nazi crimes by equating Auschwitz with the Gulag.
Nolte argued that Hitler had “rational” reasons for targeting the Jews and rejected the “collective guilt” attributed to Germany since 1945. Today, AfD leader Alice Weidel echoes this stance, dismissing Germany’s remembrance culture as a “guilt cult”.
Where Nolte blamed the Soviets, today’s political establishment blames Muslims. The goal is the same: to erase German responsibility from history.
From denial to enabling
Genocide denial is not a passive act of forgetting but an active, harmful process that perpetuates violence. Genocide scholar Gregory Stanton recognises denial as the final stage of genocide, one that is also a critical sign that the next one is coming.
For survivors and their descendants, denial deepens trauma by invalidating suffering, distorting truth, and stripping victims of dignity, memory and justice. These wounds extend beyond individuals, affecting entire communities across generations.
Meanwhile, genocide denial shields perpetrators, delays reparations and blocks reconciliation, deepening social divisions. It also undermines international law and human rights frameworks, signalling that even crimes against humanity can be ignored.
Genocide denial, thus, directly prepares the ground for the next genocide to take place and be accepted. We see this clearly in how Europeans are reacting to the genocide in Gaza, denying that it is happening at all, despite repeated pronouncements by United Nations experts and genocide scholars, and continuing to provide Israel with weapons and diplomatic cover.
The playbook developed in Bosnia is now applied to Gaza. It follows a familiar pattern: blame “both sides”, portray victims as aggressors, and assign responsibility to a few individuals – thus hiding systematic violence. This blueprint is perhaps most clearly echoed in the claim that it is only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his two far-right ministers who are responsible for the “violence” happening in Gaza, thus separating policy from structure and evading deeper accountability.
In the narrative denying the Bosnian genocide, responsibility is also reduced to a few “bad apples” within the Serb state apparatus – as if genocide were a spontaneous aberration rather than a meticulously planned, state-executed crime requiring widespread coordination and intent.
Preparing for a future genocide in Europe
Europe today faces a profound crisis as far-right nationalism surges and a vanishing middle class struggles amid growing social and economic precarity. In many Western countries, the middle class is shrinking while what the right calls “surplus population” – disproportionately composed of Muslims – is increasingly marginalised and scapegoated.
In a time like this, recasting a past genocide against an othered population as a misunderstanding contributes to creating the environment for the next genocide to come. And there are already clear indications that segments of the political class are pushing for removing this “surplus population” under various guises.
The Nazi euphemism “Umsiedlung nach Osten” (resettlement to the East) was a grotesque excuse to deport Jews to gas chambers. Today, European actors like Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner openly advocate for “remigration”, a sinister echo of this deadly logic aimed at uprooting Muslim communities.
European political elites may not have embraced this term yet, but they are busy putting into practice various policies that have the same ultimate goal – limit or decrease the Muslim presence in Europe. They have been building a legal regime for exclusion through the 2024 EU Migration Pact, plans to offshore asylum seekers to Albania or other countries, and a big injection of cash into Frontex, the EU’s border agency accused of – among other things – illegal pushbacks.
These are not neutral measures but ideological tools of racialised removal, cloaked in liberal rhetoric. And they will only get more violent with time.
This is not alarmism. It’s a pattern. The erosion of rights always begins with those deemed to be “the other”.
If genocide denial is not urgently addressed, if the Gaza genocide is not recognised and immediate action taken to stop it, Europe risks coming full circle. With genocide denial expanding and the urge to renounce responsibility for the Holocaust growing, the ground is being prepared for these horrific atrocities to repeat.
Democratic lawmaker killed and another wounded in Minnesota in apparently ‘politically motivated’ attacks
Governor Tim Walz was briefed on ‘ongoing situation’ in which Minneapolis-area state senator and representative were shot
Two Minnesota lawmakers have been shot in their separate homes.
One of the lawmakers – Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman – has died, as has her husband, Mark, the state’s governor, Tim Walz, confirmed at a press conference on Saturday. He said the shooting “appears to be a politically motivated assassination”.
Democratic state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were both shot multiple times and are out of surgery, and Walz said he was “cautiously optimistic” both will survive.
“This was an act of targeted political violence,” Walz said.
Walz said in a statement on Saturday morning that he was briefed on the “ongoing situation” in the suburbs of Champlin and Brooklyn Park, both of which are in the Minneapolis metropolitan area.
The shootings took place at a time when political violence has become more commonplace in the US, though the vast majority of Americans do not support it, according to a University of Chicago survey.
Frederick Forsyth, who died last week, was a master of espionage plots that were far-fetched but compellingly based on real people and events. Yet even he might have struggled to sell as a storyline what is now going on at the top of America’s espionage and security services.
On Tuesday the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, posted on X a mocked-up film of a thermonuclear strike on San Francisco, with the Golden Gate Bridge as ground zero — complete with spooky music in the background. Then Gabbard, straight to camera, declared that the world is “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before”.
Why? No, not a reference to Israel and Iran. Rather: “Political elite warmongers are carelessly promoting fear intentions between nuclear powers. Perhaps it’s because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves that regular people won’t have access to.”
She didn’t vouchsafe who any of the members of this “elite” are. But a strong clue can be found in what Gabbard posted in the aftermath of the Oval Office fracas between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in February, when the US president yelled: “You’re gambling with World War Three.” Trump’s bizarre choice of person to oversee the CIA and the FBI followed up on X: “Absolutely true: Zelensky has been trying to drag the United States into a nuclear war with Russia/WW3 for years now.”
That is precisely the terrifying thought the Kremlin has been trying to instil in the American people (and other western nations that have supplied weaponry to Ukraine). On the day he sent his tanks towards Kyiv, Putin warned that if the West intervened in any way, “Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never experienced in your history”, adding, for those incapable of taking a hint, that Russia is “one of the most powerful nuclear states”.
As we know, despite the colossal scale of the West’s subsequent military support for Ukraine, Putin has made no overt attack in response, let alone a nuclear one. Whenever we crossed one of his supposed “red lines” — for instance when Ukraine, using British Storm Shadow missiles with US backup, demolished the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea fleet — Putin did not retaliate. Or even when Ukraine, with western materiel, invaded Russian territory in Kursk, although Putin had fulminated two months earlier: “We have a nuclear doctrine — look what it says. If someone’s actions threaten our … territorial integrity, we consider it possible to use all means at our disposal.”
Still, Gabbard seems determined to help Putin maintain some sort of terrorising power over Americans, despite the accumulated evidence that the Russian dictator has no desire to risk the Kremlin being reduced to radioactive ash in a thermonuclear exchange. For she has long been a favourite of Russia’s state media, not least when, a month after the barbaric invasion began, she posted a video that claimed the Biden administration was covering up an operation of US-controlled bio-labs in Ukraine that could release deadly pathogens. When Trump nominated her as director of intelligence, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper gloated: “The CIA and the FBI are trembling”. Rossiya-1, the main state TV channel, claimed her as a “comrade”. The presenter of its regular programme on the war, Vladimir Solovyov, called her “our girlfriend”.
But who put the idea in Trump’s mind that she was the woman for the top intelligence job in government? In Washington the name mentioned is George O’Neill Jr, the great-great-grandson of John Rockefeller (founder of Standard Oil). He had promoted Gabbard for many years, and donated to her presidential campaign — for the Democrats, hard as it may now be to believe — in 2020. And he was in Mar-a-Lago with all the other wealthiest Trumpites after the Donald’s re-election in 2024.
O’Neill has, or rather had, a personal Russian connection. This was Maria Butina, now a member of Putin’s party in the Duma, who lived in Washington until she was convicted in 2018 of being an unregistered agent of the Kremlin. One of her close contacts, named in the court documents as “US person 2”, was revealed by The Wall Street Journal to be O’Neill, described by the paper as “an outspoken advocate of closer ties with Russia”. He was not accused of any wrongdoing.
Yet even Tulsi Gabbard does not win the Vladimir Putin prize for the Kremlin’s most useful idiot within the Trump administration. That must go to the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy, Darren Beattie (who, coincidentally, married a Russian woman in 2021). Beattie has been intimately involved in the shutting-down of the State Department’s counter foreign information manipulation and interference hub, known as R/Fimi. Russian disinformation was at the heart of R/Fimi’s work, but Beattie told staff that the operation was “severely misaligned” with the Trump administration’s policies. Which is certainly true.
Before being appointed by Trump, Beattie set up a news operation of his own, called Revolver, which was determinedly pro-Kremlin. In September 2021 he declared that “every western institution would improve in quality if it were directly infiltrated and controlled by Putin”; and two months before Putin launched his “special military operation” in 2022, Beattie wrote: “Imagine the whining from the Globalist American Empire if Putin ‘invades’ Ukraine … I love it when our national security bureaucrats fail!” He also acclaimed Putin as “brave and strong”, a man who had “done more to advance conservative positions in the US than any Republican”.
Beattie is completely safe in making such observations because his outlook is in close accord with Trump’s own. As is Tulsi Gabbard’s. The only significant difference is that they are informed purely by a form of ideological passion, however grotesque.
Trump, though, is much more motivated by personal greed and perceived slights. He has never forgiven Zelensky for refusing to assist him in the uncovering of Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian business dealings. And Trump has for decades wanted — still wants — his family’s hotel business to have a foothold in Moscow. Moreover, Russian money kept the Trump Organisation solvent when US and European banks, bitten too often, were no longer prepared to lend to the future president.
Could Freddie Forsyth, a generation ago, have conceived a thriller with a US president of this nature, and an intelligence chief like Gabbard? Or a State Department official like Beattie? Possibly, but they would all have been respectable, on the surface. It’s the openness of their Kremlin-pandering that makes this stranger, more disconcerting, than any fiction.
Yesterday began with the horrific news that a gunman had shot two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses in what Minnesota governor Tim Walz said appeared to be a “politically motivated assassination.” State representative Melissa Hortman, who was the top Democrat in the Minnesota House, and her husband, Mark, both died in the attack at their home in Brooklyn Park, a city near Minneapolis. The gunman also shot Democratic Minnesota state senator John Hoffman nine times and his wife, Yvette, eight at their home in Champlin. The hospital reports they are in stable condition after surgery.
Law enforcement officers encountered the suspected gunman, 57-year-old Vance Boelter, coming out of Hortman’s house. He was dressed as a police officer. Officers exchanged gunfire with him before he fled, leaving behind his vehicle, which looked much like a police car. In it was a list of dozens of people he wanted to kill. They were mostly Democrats or people connected to abortion rights efforts. Law enforcement officers captured Boelter tonight.
MAGA Republicans are working hard to identify Boelter with what Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) called “Marxism” and Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) called “the extreme left,” but as investigative journalist Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 Nashville notes, public databases show Boelter was in the past a registered Republican. His evangelical religion and his anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion stances reflect MAGA positions. Boelter’s roommate told reporters that Boelter was a “strong” supporter of President Trump.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted that MAGA has been “bathed in political violence” for the last five years. Trump’s pardoning of the January 6 rioters, including those convicted of extreme violence, “became a clear endorsement of violence committed in his name.” Trump has encouraged violence and cozied up to brutal dictators, while MAGA has fetishized guns. When he celebrates violence, unhinged people listen. Murphy points out that while people of all political persuasions commit violence, no Democratic leader encourages violence as a political norm the way Trump and MAGA have done, citing “a straight line from Jan 6 to the pardons to the assault on Sen[ator] Padilla to Minnesota.”
After the shootings, Andrew Solender of Axios reported that lawmakers of both parties are concerned about their own safety as political violence increases. The Minnesota attacks happened just days after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s security guard shoved Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) to the ground and handcuffed him after he asked a question. This assault sparked apparent fury among the Democrats on Capitol Hill as they challenged their Republican colleagues—largely unsuccessfully—to speak up against the assault on a senator.
The entire Minnesota delegation to the U.S. Congress issued a joint statement on politically motivated shootings. Democrats and Republicans together wrote: “Today we speak with one voice to express our outrage, grief, and condemnation of this horrible attack on public servants. There is no place in our democracy for politically-motivated violence. We are praying for John and Yvette’s recovery and we grieve the loss of Melissa and Mark with their family, colleagues, and Minnesotans across the state. We are grateful for law enforcement’s swift response to the situation and continued efforts.”
After that start to the day, the country turned to the “No Kings” protests. In a dramatic rejection of Trump’s consolidation of power, at least five million Americans turned out for peaceful protests across the country. Cities turned out huge numbers of protesters at more than 2,000 planned events, and small towns, including those in Republican-dominated states, also boasted rallies. The mood was festive as people held signs with anti-Trump and pro-American images and slogans and sang Woody Guthrie’s famous American anthem, “This Land Is Your Land.” American flags were everywhere.
In contrast to the huge turnout for the protests, the military parade in Washington, D.C., was a bust. Although Trump had claimed it would be a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the American Army, it was also his 79th birthday and was widely interpreted primarily as a celebration of that occasion. Trump has wanted a parade since 2017, when he viewed the traditional Bastille Day military parade in Paris. At the time, he told reporters: “It was one of the greatest parades I’ve ever seen…. We’re going to have to try to top it.”
But organizers had had only two months to arrange for the parade, and the result was badly organized, with relatively few people turning out, especially after forecasts of storms that evening. Far from the crisp marching of the military parades that Trump seemed to want to top, the U.S. soldiers appeared to shuffle, leading to a social media debate over whether they had been ordered to march in an “at ease march” instead of a more rigorous step, or whether they were silently protesting. Photographers recorded empty bleachers and thin crowds. Few Republican lawmakers attended, but cameras caught Trump looking miserable and Secretary of State Marco Rubio yawning.
The contrast between the protests and the military parade suggested an important shift in political culture. The momentum and the joy, as well as the American flags, were on the side of those protesting Trump’s growing authoritarianism. Trump looked weak and discouraged, and the crowds were clearly on the side of the protesters. Today, social media, including a Russian account, got into the act of making fun of Trump’s military parade.
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch noted that “the flag is mightier than the tank.”
The rejection Trump faced yesterday, podcaster Jack Hopkins noted, “was a big tub of rock salt poured on his wounds of lifelong insecurity.” That profound injury to Trump’s sense of self braced observers for a lashing out of epic proportions as he tries to demonstrate that he is, in fact, powerful.
We got that anger and fear in a social media post at 8:43 p.m. tonight. In a post almost certainly not written by Trump, his account backed off on Trump’s recent retreat from mass deportations. Instead, the account said “ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
The account then declared war on Democrats. The day after a gunman shot two Democratic lawmakers and their spouses in their homes, Trump’s account posted:
“[W]e must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities—And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports—And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!”
The post promised ICE that “REAL Americans are cheering you on every day” and urged them to “reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.” It doubled down on the neo-Nazi idea of “REMIGRATION” and concluded: “To ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, the Patriots at Pentagon and the State Department, you have my unwavering support. Now go, GET THE JOB DONE! DJT”
Will Trump’s demands swing people behind him? Americans have already turned against Trump’s handling of immigration and deportations by significant margins. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers summarized the polls from June 9–13. Answering the question “Do you approve of the way the president is handling…immigration?” respondents for YouGov/Economist were the only ones to produce a majority—of just four points—saying yes. For AP-NORC, Quinnipiac, and Washington Post/GMU, the answer was no by as much as 15 points. On every other question dealing with immigration, more people opposed Trump’s policies than supported them by as much as 16 points.
Trump’s other policies are underwater—meaning more people oppose them than approve of them—as well. Only 27% of registered voters support the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill, while 53% oppose it. As for Trump himself, a Quinnipiac Poll from June 11 showed that 38% of registered voters approve of the way he is handling the job of the presidency, while 54% disapprove. Only 30% of registered voters approved “strongly” of the way he is handling the job, while 49% strongly disapprove.
While Trump and his loyalists are trying to project an image of invincibility, their actual power seems to be faltering.
Ten years ago tomorrow, on June 16, 2015, Trump rode down the escalator at Trump Tower to a lobby filled with extras, to announce he was running for president. One reporter called his speech, in which he claimed that Mexico was sending criminals and rapists to the United States, “eccentric.”
At a news conference today, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota Joseph H. Thompson, who was appointed by President Donald Trump just two weeks ago, said that Minnesota suspect Vance Boelter went to the homes of two more politicians than the two he eventually shot along with their spouses. One was on vacation with her family, and at another home, a police officer apparently scared him off.
Thompson said Boelter had “voluminous” writings that showed he had been planning the attacks for “quite some time.” “But,” Thompson added, “I have not seen anything involving some sort of political screed or manifesto that would clearly identify what motivated him. Obviously, his primary motive was to go out and murder people. They were all elected officials. They were all Democrats. Beyond that, I think it’s just way too speculative for anyone that’s reviewed these materials to know and to say what was motivating him in terms of ideology or specific issues.”
Zoe Sottile of CNN reported that Boelter is facing federal charges of two counts of stalking, two counts of murder, and two counts of firearms offenses. He is facing state charges of first-degree murder, second degree murder, and attempted murder.
MAGA loyalists have continued to radicalize in the wake of the shootings, spreading disinformation that blamed the violence on Democrats or joking about the event. Walker Orenstein of the Minnesota Star Tribune debunked the disinformation spread by MAGA loyalists, noting that Boelter was not close to Walz, who simply okayed his reappointment to a bipartisan board that then-governor Mark Dayton had put him on in 2016. According to his roommate, Boelter was a “strong supporter” of Trump.
Emily Anderson Stern and Robert Gehrke of the Salt Lake Tribune called out Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) for his behavior in the aftermath of the shootings. Lee joked about the killings and falsely blamed the violence on his political opponents, tying the shooting to Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) responded: “This was an incredible woman, her husband, her two kids—yesterday on Father’s Day, there was no Father’s Day for them. They lost both their parents…. This is not a laughing matter, and certainly what we’re seeing is an increase in violence, and this evil man who did this—this is not a joke.”
Of Lee’s behavior, influencer George Takei wrote: “Utah voters: Are these really your values? Mike Lee is the best you can do?” After Lee pinned one of his disturbing tweets to the top of his social media timeline, Tim Miller of The Bulwark wrote: “This is less of a political matter than a sign of deep mental illness.”
As of this afternoon, Trump had not called Walz, calling him “a terrible governor” and “a grossly incompetent person.”
Trump drew criticism of his own incompetence today at the meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) in Kananaskis, Alberta, in Canada. The G7 is a forum of democracies with advanced economies that includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as the European Union. During today’s meetings, Trump seemed to think the United Kingdom and the European Union were the same thing.
Trump also parroted Russian talking points, telling reporters: “The G7 used to be the G8. Barack Obama and a person named Trudeau didn't want to have Russia in, and I would say that that was a mistake, because I think you wouldn't have a war right now if you had Russia in, and you wouldn’t have a war right now if Trump were president four years ago.”
In fact, the members of the G7 kicked Russia out of the forum after Russian president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014. And former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau didn’t take office until 2015.
On Friday, journalist Dean Blundell reported that Washington insiders and observers from abroad had noticed how rarely Trump appears in public and how often he falls asleep when he does, prompting speculation that he is not physically able to do the work of the presidency. Blundell suggested Trump’s team would look for a way to get the president out of the G7 early to avoid exposure.
After today’s meetings, at which it appears the U.S. was delaying a joint statement in which G7 members called for an end to the conflict between Israel and Iran, Trump posted on social media: “Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign,” although it was Trump who pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the “Iran nuclear deal” that limited Iran’s nuclear program. He continued: “What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”
More than 9 million people live in Tehran, with more than 16 million in the metropolitan area.
Then Trump’s team announced the situation in the Middle East required the president to leave the G7 a day early.
Twelve minutes after his post about evacuating Tehran, Trump reposted a Newsmax story saying that Trump “deserves an A+ for his job performance so far,” and less than an hour later, he posted an attack on right-wing personality Tucker Carlson and then posted: “AMERICA FIRST means many GREAT things, including that fact that IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Just before midnight, he posted an attack on California governor Gavin Newsom.
It’s unclear what Trump’s abrupt departure from the G7 indicates for events in the Middle East and U.S. involvement in them. As Brian O’Neill of The Contrarian noted, Trump had said he hoped to negotiate a deal with Iran, and indeed, talks were scheduled for Sunday in Oman when Israel launched its attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on Friday. O’Neill notes that when Israel struck Iran last Friday without U.S. coordination, the Trump administration was left “scrambling to respond.”
Being sidelined in foreign affairs at the same time as the American people turned out in huge numbers to protest his administration and as his military parade fizzled shows Trump has less power than he tries to project.
How decisions are being made in the administration is unclear. Notably, after Trump wrote last Thursday that “changes are coming” in deportation orders because it made no sense to deport workers who had been here for a long time and were vital to farms, hotels, and restaurants, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today reversed that decision.
Carol D. Leonnig, Natalie Allison, Marianne LeVine, and Lauren Kaori Gurley of the Washington Post reported that after Trump’s post and comments to reporters, a DHS official told agents to pause raids on agriculture, including meatpacking plants, as well as restaurants and hotels. But on Sunday, DHS leadership suggested a reversal was coming because, as the journalists write, “the White House did not support” the new policy. In a call this morning, officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told agents to continue immigration raids at the businesses Trump had said he was going to protect.
This shift makes it seem as if White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a white nationalist who insists that the U.S. must deport a million immigrants this year, is determining White House policies, just as he did on the Signal chat about the military strikes on the Houthis in Yemen when his statement that Trump wanted a strike appeared to shut down any further debate of the question.
If Trump is leaving the work of the presidency to others, his family is certainly using the prestige of the presidency to make money. In what it says is in honor of the tenth anniversary of Trump’s trip down the Trump Tower escalator into presidential politics, the Trump Organization has launched a mobile phone service. As Nikki McCann Ramirez of Rolling Stone explains, the plan is essentially another licensing deal, with the disclaimer specifying that the service simply uses the Trump name after contracting with another provider.
The announcement claims that new made-in-America gold phones will be available in September, but as David Pierce of The Verge notes, the photoshopped image of the phone and the wonky specs on it, as well as the impossible promise to make them in America within three months, mean the phone “looks both bad and impossible.” The phone, too, is simply branded with the Trump name; the family business will not design or manufacture it.
The family was evidently in a hurry to get this venture up and running. Kelcee Griffis of Bloomberg reported that the Trump Organization only applied for the trademarks for it last Thursday.
Yesterday at the meeting of the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), a forum of democracies with advanced economies, President Donald Trump told reporters: “The UK is very well protected. You know why? Because I like them, that's why. That's the ultimate protection.”
Commenters often note that Trump talks like a mob boss, but rarely has his organized-crime style of governance been clearer than in yesterday’s statement.
Also yesterday, Ana Swanson and Lauren Hirsch of the New York Times reported that Trump has taken unprecedented control over U.S. Steel. Japan’s Nippon Steel has been trying to take over U.S. Steel since 2023, but the Biden administration blocked the deal for security reasons. In order to move it forward, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demanded an agreement that gives to the president and his successors, or a person the president designates, a single share of preferred stock, known as class G, or “gold.” The deal gives the president permanent veto power over nearly a dozen actions the company might want to take, as well as power over its board of directors.
Swanson and Hirsch note that the U.S. government historically takes a stake in companies only when they are in financial trouble or when they play a significant role in the economy. “We have a golden share, which I control, or the president controls,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday. “Now I’m a little concerned whoever the president might be, but that gives you total control.”
This kind of deal echoes those of the authoritarians Trump appears to admire. His ongoing support for Russian president Vladimir Putin was on display at the G7, when he echoed Russian talking points that blamed European countries and the United States for Putin’s war against Ukraine, rather than acknowledging that it was Russia that attacked Ukraine after giving assurances that it would respect Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up the Soviet nuclear weapons stored there.
Also yesterday, Rene Marsh and Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that officials from the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump have been telling staff in the Midwest—which the authors note has a legacy of industrial pollution—to “stop enforcing violations against fossil fuel companies.” At the same time, the Department of Justice has cut its environmental division significantly, leaving “no one to do the work.”
Trump vowed that if he were reelected he would slash the oil and gas regulations he claims are “burdensome.” Now, one EPA enforcement staffer told Marsh and Nilsen, “The companies are scoffing at the cops. EPA enforcement doesn’t have the leverage they once had.”
Also yesterday, outdoor journalist Wes Siler reported in Wes Siler’s Newsletter that while language inserted in the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill requires the sale of up to 3.3 million acres of publicly owned land, an amendment authorizes the sale of 258 million acres more over the next five years. The amendment comes from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and was written by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Steve Daines (R-MT).
It includes Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands in 11 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. As Siler notes, while the measure does not currently include national monument lands, the Department of Justice under Trump is arguing that the president can revoke national monument protections. If it did so, that would make another 13.5 million acres available for purchase.
Siler notes the process for selling those lands calls for an enormous rush on sales, “all without hearings, debate, or public input opportunities.”
Today, Eliot Brown of the Wall Street Journal reported that Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is now one of the many wealthy foreign real estate developers “pouring money” into the Trump Organization. Brown noted that the Trump family is aggressively developing its businesses while Trump is in the White House, reaching past real estate into cryptocurrency and other sectors.
The growing power of international oligarchs to use the resources of the government for their own benefit recalls a speech Robert Mueller, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gave in New York City in 2011. In it, he explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. No longer regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated, with multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.
These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”
These criminal enterprises, he noted, were working to corner the market on oil, gas, and precious metals. And to do so, Mueller explained, they “may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called 'iron triangles' of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”
The FBI’s increasing focus on organized crime and national security is what prompted its interest in the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016.
The willingness of Republicans to enable Trump’s behavior is especially striking today, since June 17 is the anniversary of the 1972 Watergate break-in. On that day, operatives associated with President Richard M. Nixon’s team tried to tap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate complex. Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard, noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.
The story played out over the next two years with Nixon insisting he was not involved in the affair, but in early August 1974 a tape recorded just days after the break-in revealed Nixon and an aide plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Republican senators who had not wanted to convict their president of the charges of impeachment being considered in the House knew the game was over. A delegation of them went to the White House to tell Nixon they would vote to convict him.
On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.
Chris Geidner of LawDork notes that despite the lawmakers in our own era who are unwilling to stop Trump, “the pushback…is very real.” Geidner notes not just the No Kings Day protests of the weekend, but also a lawsuit by the American Bar Association (ABA) suing Trump for his attacks on law firms and lawyers, calling Trump’s actions “unprecedented and uniquely dangerous to the rule of law.”
Geidner also notes that lower court judges are upholding the Constitution, and he points especially to U.S. District Judge William Young, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan. In a hearing yesterday, Young insisted on holding the government accountable “for both Trump's actions and the follow-up actions from those Trump has empowered to act.”
Young called cuts to funding for National Institutes of Health research grants “illegal” and “void” and ordered the NIH to restore the funds immediately. “I am hesitant to draw this conclusion—but I have an unflinching obligation to draw it—that this represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. That’s what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.”
“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” Young said during the hearing. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.” He added: “You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The Constitution will not permit that.… Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”
