This sort of thing has happened before: the US President now finds himself in the same league as Benito Mussolini and the Argentine military junta (not only re football!).
What Trump does not realize – or perhaps he simply doesn’t care – is that he has done the whole of American soccer no favors by putting his thumb on the scales.
The USMNT have reached their current station in the tournament on their own merits, riding three exceptional performances and one bang average one to the last 16. Balogun has been arguably the their best player throughout that run.
Yet even without the Monaco striker, there was no shortage of pundits and oddsmakers pegging the US as likely to win against Belgium. The perception the US have been handed an unfair advantage here – they have, to be clear – taints their potential advancement. This is true in the States, but much more so globally where Trump has become the latest in a long line of ugly Americans who are perceived, fairly or unfairly, to have expected preferential treatment.
He said he did not want to negotiate with Tehran and wanted nothing more to do with Iran.
In Ankara, Türkiye, for a two-day summit of the countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), President Donald J. Trump told reporters he was “very disappointed with NATO” because it had not backed its war on Iran. “We weren’t treated well because we did something in Iran,” he said. “We don’t need anybody’s help. I didn’t even want their help. They said they wouldn’t be there. And we’ve invested trillions of dollars in NATO. Why? To protect European countries and others, Canada, et cetera, but to protect people, countries from generally speaking, it used to be the Soviet Union, now it’s Russia, and I say that’s fine, but you would think that they’d be very willing to do something to help us, and they really weren’t.”
Trump went on to claim his beef with NATO began over Greenland, which he wants “because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark…but it’s an important part for the United States. And it’s surrounded by China ships and Russian ships And that’s not going to happen. The ships is, it’s not going to happen. It was Greenland that, in my, and it continues to be, that should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark. And when they wouldn’t go along with it and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia and we don’t have to spend any money, we could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe because as you probably noticed, Europe’s a very different place than it was 20 years ago. A lot different. Much different. It’s a much different and they better be careful with immigration and energy. If they’re not careful with those two things, you’re not going to have a Europe anymore. Okay. Thank you very much everybody.”
NATO is the most effective alliance in human history. It is also a defensive, not an offensive, alliance.
Representatives from the the United States and eleven other nations in North America and Europe came together to sign the original NATO declaration on April 4, 1949. The alliance guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend each other against an attack by a third party. At the time, their main concern was resisting Soviet aggression, but as Trump noted, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO resisted Russian aggression instead.
The alliance is effective because it calls for collective defense. Article 5 of the treaty requires every nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked militarily. That article has been invoked only once: in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.
On the day NATO went into effect, President Harry S. Truman said, “If there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.” In the years since 1949, his observation seems to have proven correct. NATO now has 32 member nations.
Crucially, NATO acts not only as a response to attack, but also as a deterrent, and its strength has always been backstopped by the military strength of the U.S., including its nuclear weapons. Trump has repeatedly attacked NATO and said he would take the U.S. out of it in a second term, alarming Congress enough that in 2023 it put into the National Defense Authorization Act a measure prohibiting any president from leaving NATO without the approval of two thirds of the Senate or a congressional law.
But as foreign policy specialist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic in 2024, even though Trump might have trouble actually tossing out a long-standing treaty that has safeguarded national security for 75 years, the realization that the U.S. is abandoning its commitment to collective defense would make the treaty itself worthless.
In place of the powerful NATO alliance that has protected all nations’ sovereignty, Trump appears to want the sort of world called for by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, in which great powers carve up the globe into spheres of influence.
In January, Robert Kagan warned that Trump’s destruction of the order that has underpinned global security for the past 80 years was creating the most dangerous world since World War II. With the end of open access to global resources, markets, and strategic bases and without reliable friends or allies, the U.S. will need more military spending than ever.
“Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future,” Kagan warned. They are accustomed to the “basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world” and have come to think it is “the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.”
Everything will be up for grabs, Kagan wrote, with myriad “flash points for potential conflict.” “If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive,” Kagan wrote, “wait until they start paying for what comes next.”
Kagan published his article just two weeks after Trump had sent troops to Venezuela to seize the nation’s president and his wife and take control of the country’s oil fields. Since then, as Simon Romero of the New York Times reported yesterday, the Trump administration has taken an estimated $8 billion in oil revenue out of the country, although it has refused to say how it is using the funds.
In the wake of the devastating earthquakes that hit Venezuela on June 24, Romero reports that the U.S. has so far pledged only $300 million in aid. U.S. officials destroyed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), through which it would have distributed aid in the past, so the assistance is being funneled through the Red Cross, the United Nations, and religious organizations. The top U.S. diplomat in Venezuela, John Barrett, told Romero the U.S. will continue to prioritize using Venezuela’s oil resources to rebuild the nation’s economy.
Less than six weeks after The Atlantic published Kagan’s article, Trump attacked Iran in strikes he appeared to think would mirror the strikes against Venezuela, enabling him to replace Iran’s leadership with men willing to work with the U.S. and perhaps enabling the U.S. to take a stake in Iran’s oil production.
Instead, Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz in the aftermath of the strikes, choking off about 27% of the world’s globally traded oil and about a third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer. Rather than a quick strike, Trump’s war on Iran is now stretching into its fifth month, and attempts to end it, even on terms worse than when it began, are faltering.
Tonight, at 5:15, as NATO leaders met in Türkiye, U.S. Central Command announced that U.S. forces had launched “a series of powerful strikes against Iran to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping crewed by innocent civilians in an international waterway.” It said the strikes were a “response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s demonstrated aggression was unwarranted, dangerous, and a clear violation of the ceasefire.”
It later said it had hit more than 80 targets.
Quote:chalk it up as yet another embarrassing loss for the cowardly POTUS...He said he did not want to negotiate with Tehran and wanted nothing more to do with Iran.
As alliance gathers in Ankara, European leaders have an informal strategy to try to keep US president on side
Nato leaders have informally agreed not to mention the football World Cup to Donald Trump for fear of irritating the US president at a crucial time for the military alliance.
Officials said European leaders had discussed in the sidelines of the summit in Ankara how to keep Trump on side amid concerns he could further destabilise Nato with threats over defence spending.
They are already working together to reassure the US president they are pulling their weight financially by building “a stronger and more European Nato” with each member on track to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035.
In the first open acknowledgment of the strategy, the Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, told reporters in Ankara he would not be discussing his country’s 4-1 win over the US earlier this week.
The summit follows a row caused by Trump asking the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, to review the red card shown to the US striker Folarin Balogun, meaning he could then play in the match against Belgium.
Before meeting Trump at the summit, De Wever joked to reporters that the US president “has the reputation of sometimes reacting a bit irritably to things that he doesn’t like, and I think this defeat will hit hard”.
Nato leaders have informally agreed not to mention the football World Cup to Donald Trump for fear of irritating the US president at a crucial time for the military alliance.
Officials said European leaders had discussed in the sidelines of the summit in Ankara how to keep Trump on side amid concerns he could further destabilise Nato with threats over defence spending.
They are already working together to reassure the US president they are pulling their weight financially by building “a stronger and more European Nato” with each member on track to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035.
In the first open acknowledgment of the strategy, the Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, told reporters in Ankara he would not be discussing his country’s 4-1 win over the US earlier this week.
The summit follows a row caused by Trump asking the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, to review the red card shown to the US striker Folarin Balogun, meaning he could then play in the match against Belgium.
Before meeting Trump at the summit, De Wever joked to reporters that the US president “has the reputation of sometimes reacting a bit irritably to things that he doesn’t like, and I think this defeat will hit hard”.
“Of course, the losing party is also present. That also happens to be the biggest partner in Nato.”
Asked whether he was worried Trump could be annoyed that the US had dropped out of the tournament, he told the Flemish broadcaster VRT: “I’m not going to start [talking] about it myself. But if he were to say something about it, then I’ll see what that is and how I can react to it.”
Trump has yet to comment about the US team’s defeat, but was mocked during the match by several Belgian players mimicking his signature dance move after their fourth goal.
In the run-up to England’s quarter-finals match against Norway on Saturday, Keir Starmer teased his Norwegian counterpart that England “only win the World Cup under Labour governments”.
The prime minister exchanged banter with Jonas Gahr Støre after a meeting in Ankara during which they wore their respective national team shirts.
After the U.S. resumed bombing Iran yesterday evening, Iranian forces retaliated early this morning with strikes on U.S. military facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait.
In Ankara, Türkiye, for a NATO summit, President Donald J. Trump told reporters that Iranian leaders are “scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re, they’re vicious, violent people,” Trump said in his comments earlier Wednesday. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars.… There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, [negotiations are] over.”
The U.S. then launched another round of strikes on Iran to “further degrade” its “ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”
Oil prices spiked over the course of the day, and Trump appeared to walk back his earlier words, saying: “I think anything that happens is going to be over very quickly, and we’ll only make it safer, including for oil. Oil is going to be very free, very easy, and it’s going to happen very fast. We have the Hormuz Strait; the boats have pulled out. I mean there’s a gusher of oil right now, we have a lot of oil.”
As Tom Nichols noted in The Atlantic, the U.S. emphatically does not have the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War,” the title of Nichols’s article reads. It goes on to say that the Iranians are calling the shots in the war and “are routinely humiliating the American president.” The so-called ceasefire was likely intended to calm oil markets, Nichols says; neither side ever stopped shooting.
Like many other observers, Nichols noted that Trump was “incoherent” in Ankara. He referred to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Japan” and referred to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin.” In an off-with-their-heads! moment, he also announced he had ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off all trade with Spain.
According to Humeyra Pamuk and David Latona of Reuters, Trump repeatedly complained about Spain, whose leftist prime minister Pedro Sánchez refused to let the U.S. use its bases or airspace to attack Iran even though Spain has been dramatically increasing its NATO spending. Trump then told Bessent: “I don’t want to do any more trade with them, alright? Don’t even talk to them. They’re hopeless. They’re bad people.... They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less. I want no business with them.”
As economist Paul Krugman notes in his newsletter, cutting off trade with Spain is simply not going to happen. First of all, Trump does not have the authority to do any such thing. Second, the U.S. actually does a lot of business with Spain, and American businesses would not accept any such cuts. But even more, it is impossible because Spain is part of the European Union. As Krugman notes, this declaration is rather like Europe declaring it is going to cut off all trade with Florida.
Trump’s declaration is a “non-event,” Krugman notes. It is “not something that is real.”
What we should take from it, he says, is that the statement was “completely crazy.” “In any kind of normally functioning political system,” he said, “in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.”
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker agrees. He reposted Trump’s reference to the Islamic Republic of Japan with the comment: “Donald Trump is suffering from dementia. Someone needs to step in before it’s too late.”
Meanwhile, Jack Detsch and Paul McLeary of Politico reported that European officials at the NATO summit reacted to Trump’s announcement of new attacks on Iran just a day after he had praised Iranian leaders with the recognition that they can no longer rely on the United States.
A European official told the Politico reporters: “After seeing what’s happening in Iran and Ukraine, we first of all, have to build our own military might, and then everybody will respect us: Americans, Russians, Iranians or Chinese. The more muscles you have, the less political anger you show.”
A German official was more succinct: “Europeans don’t take Trump seriously any longer.”
Meanwhile, Steven Rattner of MS NOW noted today that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s sons have raised about $13 billion in investment capital from foreign governments, mostly in the Middle East, even as Kushner is working for Trump as special envoy to the region.
Today marks the anniversary of a dramatic reworking of the U.S. constitutional order.
On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation that brought the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life. They required the federal government to protect the equal rights of all American men.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.
Northern Republican lawmakers refused to accept this caricature of freedom. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.
Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.
But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.
It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
The Fourteenth Amendment overturned that idea, recognizing the federal government’s power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.
Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states.
The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
At the time, Bork’s supporters expressed outrage at what they insisted was Kennedy’s smear campaign, for surely the right-wing attack on the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment would never so completely undermine modern society.
And yet in 2026, here we are.
Presumably afraid of investigations into his actions, President Donald J. Trump appears to have abandoned all pretense of governing for the good of the country and is focusing on rigging the 2026 election to keep Republicans in power.
This morning, as the National Association of Realtors reported that U.S. home prices have hit an all-time high, he announced that he will not sign the housing bill, which was designed to address the unaffordability of housing and which passed Congress with strong bipartisan majorities, “in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”
As the Lincoln Project summed it up, the Republican Party’s message four months before the midterms appears to be, “You’re not getting affordable housing unless you give up your voting rights.”
His demand for the passage of a bill that most observers agree will suppress voting is only one of the ways that Trump is trying to rig the 2026 election.
After federal judges have repeatedly prohibited the administration from seizing state voter lists, apparently to run them through a program designed to identify noncitizens who are not eligible for certain federal programs (something federal judges have also prohibited), Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice appear to have turned to trying to intimidate election officials.
On Tuesday the Department of Justice confirmed that it has sent letters to election officials in all fifty states and Washington, D.C., warning them that they could be criminally prosecuted if noncitizens vote. The letters came from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump loyalist, and gave them five days to detail how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”
Utah lieutenant governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican, posted on social media: “Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution. I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts. This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”
Last night, Trump fired the last two Democratic members of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent federal commission that helps state and local officials make sure elections are smooth and secure. Among other things, it certifies voting machines and maintains the national mail-voter registration forms. The only other current member of the EAC, a Republican, resigned. The fourth member of the EAC, a Republican, resigned earlier this year.
A White House official told Justin Papp of CNBC that the Supreme Court recognized Trump’s authority to fire the agency officials in its June 29 Trump v. Slaughter decision, which overturned more than 90 years of precedent to rubber stamp the president’s right to fire agency officials who are not aligned with his political agenda.
“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted,” the official told Papp. “The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so.”
Legal analyst Harry Litman says this interpretation of the Slaughter decision is a stretch. He noted that “[n]othing in the agency cases held that Trump could simply shut down an agency of Congress’s creation. That’s what he has done with the [E]lection Assistance [C]ommission which now lacks commissioners to act. It’s taking the court’s cases to the ultimate conclusion and just disabling an important agency.”
The nonpartisan, nonprofit League of Women Voters, which works to protect the right to vote, called the removal of the Election Assistance Commission officials “a direct attack on the independence of our nation’s election infrastructure…. The American people deserve elections administered by trusted professionals, not shaped by political interference. This is not a routine personnel decision—it is a dangerous escalation in the effort to weaken the safeguards that protect free and fair elections in the November midterms.”
This is the backdrop for the news from Betsy Klein and Kaitlan Collins of CNN today that the White House is fortifying the White House entrance at the North Portico during Trump’s renovation of the Ionic columns there.
In March, Trump’s appointee to the Commission on Fine Arts, which advises Trump on design matters, urged replacing the historic Ionic columns with more ornate Corinthian columns that would match the ones Trump picked out for his ballroom. The White House says the work on the North Portico is “standard restoration work,” but did not answer CNN’s question about whether there would be more substantial changes to the North Portico. Trump recently posted pictures of the Corinthian columns at his proposed ballroom, boasting that “When completed, there will be nothing like it anywhere in the World!”
While the focus has been on the historic columns and their possible replacement, it is not until now we have learned about the strengthening of the White House door. The portico is now covered with scaffolding that is covered with a drape, and a White House official told Klein and Collins that the renovations will include security enhancements at the request of the U.S. Secret Service.
Dan Diamond of the Washington Post also reported today that under the Trump administration, the Secret Service, the White House, and the Interior Department are seeking to place permanent eight- to nine-foot-tall fencing around Lafayette Square, where tourists and protesters congregate, in front of the White House. They are also considering fencing off the parts of Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. In the past, when officials believed it was necessary to shut off access to Lafayette Square, they used temporary barriers to avoid the perception that they were restricting public access to what is known as the People’s House.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting congressional representative from the District of Columbia., objected. “More fencing around the President’s Park would send the wrong message to the nation and the world by continuing to transform our democracy from one that is accessible and of the people to one that is exclusive and fearful of its own citizens,” she said.
Tonight, at 11:59 PM, the housing bill became law without the president’s signature.
Last night the Department of Justice subpoenaed reporters from the New York Times over a story the newspaper published on Wednesday. Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt reported that the Secret Service had security concerns about the new Air Force One Boeing 747-8 given to the U.S. by Qatar. So, when tensions escalated with Iran while Trump was in Türkiye for the NATO summit, they asked the president to use one of the other, older, Air Force One planes for his return journey.
Trump and White House officials pushed back strongly against the idea that the new plane had any security problems after pouring what appears to have been hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into renovating the plane. But, according to Adam Gramegna of Military . com, U.S. officials told CBS News that the speed with which the plane was rushed into service meant that it does not have the same protections as the older planes.
According to Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, the story that his prized plane was not as good as the older ones enraged Trump, and the White House called in FBI director Kash Patel to find the two anonymous sources who leaked it. Patel spent about 8 hours on Friday running an investigation from the White House, rather than FBI headquarters, before the reporters received the subpoenas.
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton, whom Trump has nominated to be the next director of national intelligence, issued the subpoenas. The reporters are ordered to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.” The Department of Justice said the subpoenas are related to “the crime of leaking national security information.”
The Justice Department emphasized that “reporters are not the targets. Those leaking classified information are.” But issuing subpoenas to U.S. journalists, who are protected from government interference by the First Amendment, is a huge red flag. As former Time magazine editor Rick Stengel noted: “The reporting that the Times journalists have been subpoenaed for is exactly the kind of journalism the First Amendment is designed to protect: matters involving national security and taxpayer dollars. Reporting that embarrasses a president is protected speech.”
David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the Times, said: “The appearance of Federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects. Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used. This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”
By 11:18 PM on Friday, Trump’s fury had turned back to Iran. He posted on social media that if Iran tried to assassinate him, “Locked and Loaded” missiles would begin to rain down on the country “to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran—PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”
Today he turned his anger toward those questioning his mental acuity, particularly New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, who commented on MS NOW about his reference in Türkiye to the “Islamic State of Japan.” At 12:23 PM he lashed out at “Maggot Hagerman” and then, to refute her claims, wrote that he “just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed, I do it every six months, and I requested another Cognitive Test, the only President to do so, three times, and I aced them all—Got every question right. Few people in Washington, D.C., could do so, including Maggot and her flunky associate, Jonathan Swan. I would be willing to bet they couldn’t get 50% of the questions right.”
The White House said Trump was referring to a physical he underwent in May.
Then, at 3:16, the president’s account posted a screed of almost 450 words complaining angrily that “I win the Election IN A LANDSLIDE against the entire Dumocrat Party,…against almost 100% negative press and Fake News,…especially Maggot Hagerman, one of the most unattractive people in the News “Business,” and her lightweight assistant, Jonathan Swan…. All I do is WIN, often against all odds,” yet no one compliments him on his great successes.
Here he may have had in mind Thursday’s news story from Catherine Rampell of The Bulwark about his claim on social media on Monday that Walmart would be “dropping the price of ground beef by almost 15 percent” “at my Administration’s request.” Rampell reported that a Walmart spokesperson told her a different story: the price cuts were part of usual summer rollbacks, which had begun the week before Trump took credit for them. Rampell noted that Trump “looks for opportunities to slap his name on politically useful things that companies were already planning to do—seasonal sales, major investments, hiring, et very much cetera.”
White House spokesperson Kush Desai clarified on social media that the president’s “announcement was that the sale is extending all summer long,” adding, “The media’s obsessive need to try to undermine any good news when it affects President Trump is pathological.”
A rant about the news media took up most of Trump’s long post, as he insisted that those reporting his bad poll numbers and policy failures “have no credibility…. If the Election was held again today, I would win by even more—Actually, much more!” he posted. “The Dumocrats don’t have what it takes, their Policies are wrong, and they are, generally, stupid people. They are going COMMUNIST because they are a desperately ‘sinking ship,’ and there’s not a thing they can do about it.
“Instead of writing inaccurate, false articles, for over 10 years now, shouldn’t it be time that they say, ‘We give up, we can’t beat him, there seems nothing we can do.’ Isn’t it time they say, ‘TRUMP IS THE BEST POLITICAL ATHLETE OF ALL TIME! CONGRATULATIONS, MR. PRESIDENT. YOU HAVE BEATEN US FOR 10 YEARS, AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO WASTE OUR TIME FIGHTING YOU ANY LONGER. WE CAN’T WIN. DO A GREAT JOB, SIR, RUNNING OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’”
Journalist Aaron Rupar used a common meme often used to respond to unreasonably long posts. “I ain’t reading all that,” he commented. “I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.” Conservative lawyer George Conway wrote: “A severely mentally ill man has control of the launch codes for America’s nuclear arsenal, but it doesn’t seem that many people care.”
Almost 450 words evidently weren’t enough. At 4:54 he reiterated the themes of the long post in a shorter one, then a minute later, accused “the Dumocrats” of being communists. A minute after that, he claimed: “The Radical Left Lunatics, often referred to as Dumocrats, have lost control of their Party.”
Apparently, media criticism still stung. At 5:27, Trump took on reports of the high cost of his damaging renovations in Washington, D.C. Posting photos of what he said was “the horrible front of the White House,” he continued: “The Radical Left Dumocrats criticize me for spending so much time bringing our White House back to the Glory of 100 years ago—Actually, it will be far better than that, and they will not shame us for bringing our Great and Brilliant Monuments to the past and the future back to levels never seen before. This is what we are doing all over Washington, D.C., and, in different ways, with our Country, itself!”
But his confidence that American voters will support Republicans in the 2026 elections is shaky enough that he continues to call for the Senate to rig them. At 6:07 he reposted what purported to be a poll from right-wing loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) claiming that 97.2% of supporters want the Senate to take up the voter suppression SAVE America Act when it goes back into session next week, while only 2.8% want the Senate to take up “Anything else.”
Meanwhile, on Friday a Pentagon official told Rebecca Turco of WJLA 7News in Washington, D.C., that National Guard troops will stay activated in Washington through Inauguration Day 2029 “until law and order are fully restored in our Nation’s Capital.”
“So,” Bill Kristol of The Bulwark commented. “[M]ilitary troops under the direct control of Trump and Hegseth will be on the streets of our nation’s capital for the rest of Trump’s term. The rationale—they’re here to help with a crime emergency—is laughable. But of course the real reason is ominous.”
