The Weekly List

This week Trump finds himself hitting all sorts of unenviable records for lowest approval, least public support for a war, and lowest approval on economic issues, even as midterm elections are now just three months away. Trump dismissed the polls as fake — a tactic he used during his first regime — but there is also a vast difference in his sentiment and approach this go-round. In his second regime, Trump does not seem to care about his polling data or Republican losses; rather, he has other priorities.
An NYT reporter explained that Trump’s major focus now is on his legacy projects: putting his name and image wherever possible, especially in Washington D.C., before his time in office runs out. Since he has also been reported as saying he will pardon his entire regime before leaving office, he is less worried about what Democrats can do with control of the House and potentially the Senate. He has also shown little interest in actual policy or governing in this second year of his second regime. His cabinet likewise has little to show for their time in power. Other than his legacy, Trump continues to focus on personally enriching himself, and raising hundreds of millions to pay for all his pet projects.
Trump is facing some pushback this week, although minor, and hardly a profile in courage given that most of it is coming from outgoing members of Congress. U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro dropped charges relating to Trump’s Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, raising his ire while revealing his lies and his regime’s incompetence. Federal judges continued to rule against Trump’s efforts to federalize midterms and other extreme measures. Trump’s Iran war is a complete mess, and risks turning into an endless quagmire, which will further mar his disastrous performance.

This was a disastrous week for Trump. Little is going his way, and the American people are increasingly turning against him. Trump continued to focus on his personal priorities, not issues that his party wants 100 days away from midterm elections, and not on what the American people want either. Nearly three-quarters of Americans said Trump was not paying attention to the country’s important issues, like the economy and affordability. Although Trump had promised his Iran “excursion” would last mere weeks, months later he is caught in an increasingly unpopular quagmire of a war.
Trump suffered setbacks in a number of legal battles this week, including being forced to withdraw subpoenas of NYT reporters; losing an appeal on his efforts to thwart mail-in voting; a judge requiring significant financial disclosures in his BBC lawsuit; a long pause on Paramount’s proposed takeover of Warner Bros., parent company of CNN; and more.
At a rescheduled White House Correspondents Dinner, Trump gave a rambling, insult-laden keynote, which fell flat. The irony of the mission of the association being to defend the First Amendment, while Trump continued to use the levers of his regime to attack both journalists and media outlets, left some attendees wondering if at long last it was time to “rethink” the dinner, or consider other alternatives while an autocrat was in office.

While we are in the lazy days of summer, this week had story lines that made the country feel as if in chaos, with a much ballyhooed speech by Trump on the 2020 election, and an escalation of the Iran War.
Much to his chagrin, Trump’s prime time speech was not covered by all the networks, causing him to call for licenses to be revoked. The speech was a rehashing of past conspiracies, with Trump blaming the “deep state” for withholding the information he was about to release from him while, ironically, he was president during the alleged election fraud. Materials released after the speech fell flat, and the response was muted.
The Iran War escalated this week as the ceasefire came to an end, and while the U.S. struck Iran, Iran in turn struck U.S. bases in the region, killing more U.S. troops. Once again, the Pentagon tried to withhold information on wounded soldiers. After failing to hold a press conference for two and a half months, Defense Department Sec. Pete Hegseth came hat in hand looking for more money for the Iran War. Little was offered by way of explanation for where the war was headed, let alone the U.S.’s objectives. All the power and decisions continued to be made by one man.
Chaos and incompetence continued to rule at federal agencies. This week at confirmation hearings, Trump appointees appeared bound by their loyalty test not to say out loud that Joseph Biden won the 2020 election. Other agencies like Health and Human Services, which still has no confirmed leader at the CDC, showed signs of its inability to handle basic tasks, amid growing outbreaks of the measles, and now cyclospora.

This week Trump pushed boundaries to new extremes, while the judicial branch pushed him back on others. In the aftermath of NYT reporting that Trump had switched Air Force One planes to return from the NATO summit in Turkey due to security concerns, federal agents showed up at the homes of some Times reporters with subpoenas, an extraordinary measure of targeting the press. At the same time, Trump and his regime suffered some dramatic losses and pushback from judges this week on his IRS settlement, his attempts to interfere with midterms, and his efforts to avoid payment to E. Jean Carroll, which this week he finally made.
In the days after the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had hatched a new plot to kill Trump, he returned to strikes against them, bringing the U.S. back into an active war. Trump, who is used to relying on his impulses and improvisation, gyrated from saying the U.S. would control the Strait of Hormuz and charge a 20 percent protection fee, to flip-flopping back to alleged investments from Gulf states. It was unclear where Trump’s Iran War, which he is running unilaterally, was heading, or how it could possibly end.
As Trump pressed to ramp up deportations, this week three men were killed by ICE, two of whom were shot in their cars despite not being ICE agents’ intended targets. While the Department of Homeland Security sought to pull back traffic stop arrests in the aftermath, Trump overruled them the next day. Notably, the ICE agents did not have body cameras in any of the incidents, despite promises to equip officers two months ago.
This week Trump lost one of his closest allies with the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham, while the state of Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has been out of public sight for weeks, is unknown. While speaking of the loss of Graham, Trump pivoted to his SAVE America Act, continued his push to interfere in the midterms, and baselessly cast doubt about election results. Overall, it was a week of pandemonium.

In a week when the country should have been coming together to celebrate our 250th anniversary, Trump instead chose to make the Independence Day celebrations highly partisan, and all about himself. He made speeches attacking his political enemies as “communists,” and made repeated baseless claims about the dangers they posed to the country. He continued to push unfounded claims about the infiltration of others into our country, who were not only tainting the fabric of our country, but also secretly helping to elect Democrats.
Toward that end, Trump has continued his efforts to muddy the waters and sow doubt about the midterm elections. While continuing to push Republicans in Congress to end the filibuster and pass his SAVE America Act, Trump has also deployed federal agencies, this week including the FBI, the Justice Department civil rights division, and FEMA, to pressure states to change the way voting is conducted, a role that the executive branch does not have according to the Constitution. Even after 18 months in office, Trump continued to push for baseless investigations into so-called fraud in the 2020 election, of which his regime has uncovered none.
U.S. foreign policy is being decided by one mercurial man, as former alliances in Europe and the Middle East are being tested. At the NATO summit, Trump again threatened to annex Greenland, re-engaged in battle with Iran after calling their leaders “scum,” and said he would cut off U.S. trade with Spain. He also continued his castigation of our former allies for not helping in his Iran War.
The grift and quid pro quos of this regime continue to be simply astounding. This week has seen more pardons, a process that has become pay to play; continued reporting on Trump and his family’s widespread efforts to enrich themselves, even as supporters are left holding the bag with losses; countries and corporations seeking favor with Trump, and by extension our federal agencies, by being sycophantic, including lavish donations and gifts. At our 250th anniversary, the state of our democracy is weak and teetering.