What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to slink away from one of his emptier legal threats.

In the closing days of the 2024 race, veteran Iowa pollster Ann Selzer released a poll that had Trump trailing Vice-President Kamala Harris by 3. It was surprising, it was an outlier with every other Iowa poll in the field, and it was wrong: Trump won the state handily. Almost immediately after the election was called, Trump sued Selzer and the Des Moines Register on the theory that incorrectly predicting the result of the election amounted to interference in it.

Of course, polls frequently fail to predict election results, and misleading "push" polls meant to sway public opinion—which Selzer's wasn't—aren't illegal or grounds for a civil suit. (Trump himself not only makes up poll numbers on the spot, he makes up nonexistent polls.) Legal experts believed the suit was meritless and would go nowhere. 

Today, Trump moved to dismiss the suit in federal court, and filed an identical suit in Iowa state court. The move and timing is significant. As of July 1, thanks to a new Iowa law, any such suit would open Trump to a serious threat from a legal maneuver known as an anti-SLAPP suit.

SLAPP stands for "strategic lawsuit against public participation." 38 states have anti-SLAPP laws, which are meant to discourage wealthy and powerful litigants from infringing on the free speech rights of their critics by threatening expensive lawsuits. Under anti-SLAPP laws, the bad-faith suit Trump is trying to file would be grounds for a countersuit against him. Filing today means that if the state lawsuit can go forward, Trump would escape the provisions of the new law.

In other words, Trump is trying to flee from a federal jurisdiction—where his case is a sure and high-profile loser and headed for an immediate dismissal—to a state court where he can continue to use his effectively infinite financial resources to punish someone who said something he didn't like. 

This is one of several suits Trump has filed as a private citizen against media outlets that have hurt his feelings, which he's backing up with threats based on the power of his office. He's also suing Paramount, the parent company of CBS, for $20 billion over supposed "mental anguish" related to an interview with Vice-President Harris. But as Paramount's board clearly understands, the suit is actually a solicitation for a bribe disguised as a settlement: the company has a pending merger that requires Trump's approval.

Why does this matter?

• Treating every imagined slight against the ruler into an attack on the state is what fascists do. 

• So is making an example of anyone who uses their free speech rights in ways the leader doesn't like.

• Even by Trump's standards, this is petty.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He found another thing that will happen in "two weeks."

In an interview with Fox Business that aired this morning, Trump claimed that he had found a buyer for TikTok, the social media app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It has been living on borrowed time, legally, after a law passed last year banning its use in the United States unless it was divested of Chinese ownership, due to security concerns.

Trump was the one who started the ball rolling on a TikTok ban, during his first term, issuing orders in 2020 in an attempt to force its divestment. He was motivated by the forthcoming launch of his own competing social media site, and the fact that much of the content on the youth-oriented site was not particularly flattering to him.  But once Congress began to move on passing a more legally sound bill to accomplish the ban—something that was deeply unpopular with young voters in an election year—Trump abruptly changed his tune, declaring "I like TikTok" and criticizing President Biden for signing the same law that Trump had campaigned for.

That law allows for the president to temporarily suspend the ban once and only once, for 90 days, which Trump did immediately on taking office. When that reprieve expired, he ordered another suspension, and then a third, which he has no legal authority to do. 

Trump was extremely vague on the details of the news he was breaking, saying only that "a group of very wealthy people" were interested in buying it, and that he would say more "in two weeks." If that sounds familiar, it's because it's a verbal tic Trump has come to rely heavily on to escape having to explain himself in the moment. He said earlier this month that he'd make a decision on the Iran-Israel conflict in two weeks (before launching a bombing mission a few days later that he had already ordered plans for). He used it to dodge a question in May about whether Vladimir Putin was trustworthy: Trump, who has been deeply enmeshed in the Russian president's circle for decades, wouldn't say on the day, but promised to have an opinion in two weeks. (It wasn't even the first time he'd needed a two-week reprieve where questions about where Putin were concerned.) As reporter Shawn McCreesh put it:

Tax plans, health care policies, evidence of conspiracy theories he claimed were true, the fight against ISIS, the opening of some coal mines, infrastructure plans — all were at one point or another riddles he promised to solve for the public in about two weeks.

It is a slippery thing, this two weeks — not a measurement of time so much as a placeholder. Two weeks for Mr. Trump can mean something, or nothing at all. It is both a yes and a no. It is delaying while at the same time scheduling. It is not an objective unit of time, it is a subjective unit of time. It is completely divorced from any sense of chronology. It simply means later. But later can also mean never. Sometimes. 

Of course, it's entirely possible that there is a buyer for TikTok, which is in legal limbo until Trump decides otherwise and appears to be censoring itself accordingly. 

It's not clear if the interviewer, Maria Bartiromo, followed up on the question, because the interview was taped and clearly edited, cutting off Trump's rambling train of thought in places. This is neither unusual nor inherently inappropriate, but Trump is currently suing the parent company of CBS for $20 billion dollars of "mental anguish" because 60 Minutes aired an edited version of an interview with Vice-President Kamala Harris during the campaign.

Why does this matter?

• In an actual democracy, presidents don't get to ignore the parts of laws they think are inconvenient.

• When people actually know what they're talking about, they don't generally wait two weeks to tell you about it. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He managed to get the governments of both Iran and Israel making fun of him.

Trump has made several claims about the Iran-Israel conflict recently, including today. He's insisted that he forbade Israel from assassinating Iran's Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khameni, and that Khameni should be grateful to him for that. He's repeatedly claimed that a single round of U.S. bombings on fortified mountain sites have "totally obliterated" Iran's nuclear capacity, something actual American experts say is false. And he's painted himself as both a conquering hero and a peacemaker.

Today, both Iran and Israel disputed each of these claims, and high officials in both countries took the opportunity to have a little fun at his expense. 

Daniel Katz, the Israeli Defense Minister, says that Israel did plan to assassinate Khameni during its attacks, but failed to find a good opportunity. Katz laughed at the idea that Israel needed Trump's "permission," and said that Trump had made no such request regardless—in effect, calling Trump a liar.

Katz also confirmed what essentially everyone outside of Trump's political orbit has concluded: that the U.S. attacks on three Iranian sites did not and could not have seriously disrupted Iran's nuclear program. In part this is because the key asset that Iran has now that it did not before is a stockpile of highly enriched uranium. No amount of bombing, even if those stockpiles had not been moved from the obvious targets, would render it more than temporarily unsuitable for conversion into a bomb core.

Iran has those stockpiles because in 2018 Trump pulled the United States out of the JCPOA, an international agreement that reduced sanctions against Iran in exchange for monitoring of their nuclear energy program.

Iran's government has also gotten under Trump's skin. Khameni issued a video statement on Thursday boasting about his country's attacks on Israel, and threatening to attack more United States military targets in the Middle East. Iran attacked an American airbase in Qatar in retaliation for the U.S. bombings, something that Trump, incredibly, claims he gave them permission to do. 

Khameni also made fun of Trump's posturing as Israel's "Daddy," a reference to a bit of flattery deployed against Trump by NATO officials earlier this week. Trump was enormously taken in by it and has been bragging about it on social media, including the White House official accounts.

Trump responded furiously today, insisting that not only had the bombings utterly destroyed every trace of Iran's nuclear program, but that Iran would never try to restart it. 

At times, Trump seemed to think that he had ordered the bombing of the entire nation of Iran, which has 90 million people and is roughly the size of the entire mountain west of the United States from Montana to Arizona. He insisted that Iran wasn't thinking about resuming their work on a nuclear weapon because "they're thinking about tomorrow, trying to live in such a mess."

Israel's attacks have caused enormous damage and casualties over the course of the conflict, and included the assassination of a number of prominent scientists working on the Iranian nuclear program. The bombings Trump ordered destroyed parts of some of the above-ground buildings at three military sites.

Why does this matter?

• This is about as clear an indication as it gets that nobody on the world stage actually respects Trump. 

• It shouldn't be this easy to bait the President of the United States. 

• One reason not to tell obvious lies in this situation is that not even your allies will pretend that they're true.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He gave himself yet another new tariff threat to back down from.

One day after Trump insisted that he had signed a "deal" with China that nobody in his administration—or the Chinese government—seemed to know about, Trump announced that he was "terminating" trade negotiations with Canada. The supposed trigger was a 3% tax on certain media and technology platforms' business in Canada that has been in the works for three years.

Canada's government responded by, in effect, calling Trump a liar. Prime Minister Mark Carney implied that he didn't expect any actual negotiations to stop over a new trade agreement, Trump's comments notwithstanding. This is increasingly the tack that other world leaders are taking with Trump on trade, refusing to sign more than token and non-binding deals while waiting for Trump to inevitably "chicken out."

At this point, it is almost impossible to keep track of what taxes Trump has hinted at, threatened, imposed, revoked, or head-faked towards. This latest threat would be at least the sixth tariff regime Trump has said he'll impose on American consumers of Canadian goods in as many month, though relatively little of that has actually gone into effect.

In an Oval Office event today, Trump tried to suggest that these threats would force the United States' largest trading partner to accept his terms, even though the previous ones hadn't. "We have all the cards. Every single one. We don't want to do anything bad, but economically we have such power over Canada," he told reporters. "It's not going to work out well for Canada."

In fact, as Trump still seems unwilling to believe or admit, tariffs imposed by the United States are and have always been taxes on American consumers. In the case of goods where Canada is a major supplier to U.S. consumers because the American market isn't big enough to supply everyone, those taxes are compounded by demand driving up the price even further. 

Canada is a major supplier to American consumers for lumber, oil and gas, auto parts, iron, gypsum (used in construction), potash (a component in fertilizer), and many other essentials. Even before today's outburst, state and local officials—including Republican governors—were sounding the alarm about the disastrous effects of imposing barriers to trade that flowed freely and without tax in both directions at the start of the year. There are also strong indications that Canadians angry at Trump's policies are tanking the American tourism industry.

Trump is right about one thing, though—the "cards" he has are enough to do serious damage to the Canadian economy, if not nearly as much in absolute terms as he'd be hurting the United States. It's not clear why he thinks this would be a good thing.

Why does this matter?

• One way to avoid getting a reputation as a cheap bluffer who folds at the slightest resistance is not to keep making cheap bluffs.

• Americans' economic security is more important than Donald Trump's need to feel like a tough guy. 

• The United States literally cannot afford this level of incompetence.

What did Donald Trump do today? 

He imagined, or made up, a trade deal with China he'd made "yesterday."

In recent days, the Trump administration has been carefully backing away from its self-imposed July deadline to, in effect, negotiate hundreds of trade deals simultaneously with the entire world. Not only has Trump failed to make "90 deals in 90 days," even the few "deals" that have been made are small-scale or informal.

No news is good news, in this case: markets have been rising lately on the expectation that Trump will, as his detractors predicted, "chicken out" once again and revert to some relatively low baseline tax on American consumers. This will still cause unnecessary inflation and targeted attacks by foreign governments on American industries, but not to the extent originally feared.

Then today, Trump suddenly declared at an unrelated White House event that he had signed a trade agreement with China. "We just signed with China yesterday," he said, not elaborating.

Nobody—not Trump, not his administration, and not China—had said anything about a "deal" with China on trade yesterday or at any point in the recent past. 

As of this evening, the White House has refused to elaborate on whatever Chinese trade "deal" Trump was imagining.

That said, Trump does seem to have done one deal involving China recently, only as a private citizen. This week, the Trump Organization quietly walked back its claim that the overpriced and underpowered Trump-branded cell phone he's offering will be made in the United States. Or, rather, it changed the language on its website and then denied it had done so.

As pretty much everyone in the tech industry immediately noted when the phone (or a Photoshop of it) was announced, that was impossible, and for the same reason that massively high tariffs on many other foreign products won't work: the highly specialized manufacturing infrastructure needed for it doesn't exist at that scale in the United States. Not only that, it wouldn't make any business sense to spend the billions of dollars necessary to create it when it already exists elsewhere.

The Trump Organization also lowered the already bargain-bin specs on the phone, and pushed back its release date. The phone as described in its promotional materials appears to be a clone of an existing budget Chinese-made phone.

Why does this matter?

• Past a certain point, it doesn't matter if a president is hallucinating or lying when he just makes stuff up. 

• It's wrong to lie to people about making your products in America, even if nobody really believes you at this point. 

• If Trump wants to get into the phone business, he should give up his day job regulating all of his potential competitors in the phone business.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said a central campaign promise was a joke.

Trump seemed to have regained some of his emotional equilibrium today at a NATO summit in the Netherlands. Part of the reason may have been some gentle manipulation by the former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who is currently serving as NATO's Secretary General. Rutte wrote Trump a fawning letter in advance of the meeting—which Trump promptly posted to his microblogging site—which is generally being interpreted as strategic flattery of the sort Trump is known to be susceptible to.

If so, Rutte's letter did the trick, with Trump sounding much more upbeat about NATO than he has in previous years when he treated it as a protection racket with the United States in the role of the mob boss. But his good mood evaporated when he was asked about the Russia-Ukraine war:

REPORTER: You once said that you would end the Ukraine war in twenty-four hours. You later said that you said that sarcastically—

TRUMP [angrily] Of course it was sarcastic.

REPORTER: But you've now been in office for five months and five days. Why have you not been able to end the Ukraine war?

TRUMP: Because it's more difficult than— people would have any idea.

There are two lies here. First, Trump appears to be the only person who thought it wouldn't be difficult to end that war, which he has tried to do by switching the United States' side in the middle of the conflict to align with the Putin regime.

The second lie is about Trump's campaign promises about ending the war "within 24 hours" or "on Day One" or even "before I even arrive at the Oval Office" being sarcastic. They were delivered over and over again in all apparent seriousness. CNN's Daniel Dale catalogued at least 53 separate examples taken from a partial database of Trump's public remarks. As Dale put it:

It’s sometimes hard to determine the intent of a politician’s one-time ad-libs, but this was no jovial ad-lib. Rather, the promise of a rapid end to the war was a sober staple of Trump’s pre-written rally remarks. He framed the promise as a key component of his second-term agenda, and he justified it with claims about his “credibility” as a leader, his history as a “peacemaker,” and his knowledge of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  

Other times that Trump has claimed he was "joking" after saying things in all seriousness include:

• when he said he'd give pardons to people who broke the law for him (in this case, related to the border fence he'd promised to build) 
• when he compared himself to Jesus not once but twice in one week 
• when he said that President Obama, whom he'd falsely said was a foreign-born Muslim, was the founder of ISIL 
• when he accused Democrats of treason for not clapping for him at a speech
• when he publicly begged the Putin regime to conduct cyberattacks to help him in the 2016 election (a "joke" Russia acted on the very same day, and which he didn't reveal as a "joke" until 2019) 
• when he did the same thing except in regards to the 2020 election, this time with Putin in the room 
• when he thanked Putin for expelling American diplomats because it reduced the number of State Department employees he had to pay 
• when he said it was okay for police to deliberately beat people they'd already arrested
• when he challenged Rex Tillerson, his own former Secretary of State, to an IQ test challenge because he was angry that a Tillerson quote calling him "a fucking moron" had leaked
• when he said he wanted fewer COVID tests to be done at the outbreak of the pandemic, because more people testing positive made it harder to lift restrictions that were hurting him politically
• when he lied about having been surveilled by the Obama administration, and then tried to cover for it by saying to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that Obama had spied on her too
• the many, many, many, many, many times he said he would ignore the results of any election he lost, or that people should commit crimes to keep him in office if he did
   

Why does this matter?

• You can't turn a lie into a joke just because you got caught. 

• It's bad if the President of the United States is so easily and transparently manipulated, even if the people doing it have good reasons.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He had an emotional meltdown over Iran.

Evening news yesterday was dominated by Trump's social media claims that a ceasefire had been reached between Israel and Iran. Hours went by with no confirmation, and even sporadic denials, from either country supposedly involved.

What it now appears happened was that Trump simply insisted that such a thing existed, and both Israel and Iran were scrambling to figure out how to use the confusion to their own advantage. Both sides engaged in additional attacks, enraging Trump, who continued to use his private microblogging site through the night to demand that they stop.

Early this morning, after what timestamps show could not have been more than a few hours' sleep between tweets, Trump took questions on the White House lawn from reporters. He lashed out at both countries (as well as the press for asking about it), declaring that Israel and Iran "don't know what the fuck they're doing." He leaned into the reporter who had asked the question, adding, "Do you understand that?" before storming off.

On board Air Force One, en route to the NATO summit in the Netherlands, Trump continued making inexplicable claims or demands on his blog:

The immediate result of the "friendly Plane Wave" was explosions in northern Tehran, confirmed by both Israel and Iran.

The Netanyahu government did indeed "DROP THOSE BOMBS."

 

In the midst of all of this emotional tweeting, Trump also made the stunning decision to lift some sanctions on Iran, to the benefit of another adversarial nation:

Under the previous nonproliferation agreement negotiated by President Obama and six other countries, Iran was able to reduce its international sanctions burden by allowing inspectors and monitors into its nuclear facilities. Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from that agreement in 2018 and reimposed sanctions—allowing Iran to build up its current stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

Neither Trump nor his handlers have yet explained why he was reducing sanctions on Iran while getting nothing for the United States in return. But it may be because Trump appears to believe, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, that his own attack on Iran's nuclear facilities did anything more than superficial damage.

Why does this matter?

• A president who doesn't understand that other countries will do what they think is best for themselves, and not simply whatever he wants, is too stupid or naïve to serve. 

• A president who can't control his emotions in stressful situations, or when he's tired, or when someone tells him "no," is unfit for office.   

• Whether a hostile nation does or doesn't have the capability to assemble a nuclear weapon is not something the President of the United States can afford to be self-deluded about.

• Even by Trump standards, this was a deeply embarrassing display for the United States.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got very confused about how supply and demand works. 

This morning, Trump tweeted out instructions for the world oil market:

EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN. I’M WATCHING! YOU’RE PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY. DON’T DO IT! 

This was apparently in response to the Iranian Parliament authorizing its military to close off the Straits of Hormuz to shipping. While no action has been taken yet, closing that channel would disrupt up to 20% of the world's oil supply. Even the threat of a future interruption could easily spur a rush to buy existing stocks or futures contracts. 

Trump is a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, although he's been caught lying about his performance there, which may explain why he's adamantly refused to release his grades. Even so, he must have taken Wharton's equivalent of an introductory economics course. In any such course, students are taught how in open and reasonably efficient markets, price is primarily a function of the relationship between supply and demand.

In this example, the equilibrium price is going down because of an increase in supply.

In other words, neither Trump nor anyone else can simply command "EVERYONE" to "KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN" regardless of whether there's an oil shortage. Businesses exist to make money—or to at least try to—and in a capitalist system they do not take orders from presidents to the contrary, no matter how loudly it's typed.

In reality, oil prices actually went down a little today, mostly because Iran responded to the weekend attack on its nuclear infrastructure with a relatively measured and limited response, signaling a willingness to de-escalate. That response took the form of a missile attack on a U.S. airbase in Qatar, for which Trump bizarrely thanked Iran. 

This is not the first time in recent weeks Trump has gotten confused about the extent of his powers over the entire world economy. He also commanded American companies to pay the sky-high taxes he imposed in the form of tariffs without raising prices. They declined. 

Why does this matter?

• Trump thinking he has the power to set worldwide oil prices by fiat would just be pathetic if he weren't also in a position to damage the American economy in so many other ways. 

• It's one thing to be relieved that an enemy didn't make a more serious attack against American military targets, but it's another fucking thing entirely to thank them for it.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He told a very different story on Iran than anyone else in his administration.

Trump ordered an attack on three Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities yesterday, after publicly saying that American intelligence agencies were "wrong" in their assessment that Iran was not enriching uranium to the point where it could assemble a weapon. Trump, who rarely reads the daily intelligence briefings prepared for him, did not say why he thought he knew better.

Today, Trump continued the theme of contradicting his own administration. He declared that all three sites had been "completely and totally obliterated" and with them, any capacity to create a nuclear weapon. 

That's not true, according to the Defense Department, which noted only that the external, above-ground portions of the key facility was damaged, as opposed to the extensive underground bunkers known to exist at those sites. More importantly, both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Trump's own vice-president admitted that there was no evidence that the actual enriched uranium stockpile—the material that could become the cores of weapons with one final cycle of enrichment—had been impacted by the strikes.

Trump also told a different story than three key officials today about his intentions regarding a larger war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told CBS' Face the Nation that "this wasn't a regime change move." Vice-President Vance told NBC's Meet the Press that "we don't want a regime change," and repeated it on ABC's This Week: "We don't want to achieve regime change." And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth insisted at a press conference that "this mission was not and has not been about regime change."

Later that day, Trump teased the possibility of a wider war to accomplish exactly that, in a post on his private microblogging site:

It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!! 

Trump also communicated to Iran's leadership last night that he did not seek regime change—in which case, it would mean he is more willing to lie to the American people than to hostile foreign governments. 

It hasn't been clear for some time to what extent Trump is actually in control of his own foreign policy. The growing consensus, now backed by sources from inside his administration, is that he was manipulated by Israel's embattled Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to launch an attack that Israel couldn't, in spite of the fact that Trump appeared to genuinely want to avoid any involvement, except to take credit for any diplomatic solution. 

Regardless, Trump's attempts to spin what happened yesterday as part of a plan he'd had all along don't seem to be working. First-day polls show that a clear majority of Americans disapprove, with only 35% supporting the bombings. Virtually nobody, other than Trump, appears to want war with Iran, with 85% of respondents opposed and only 5% in favor.

This is a remarkable departure from the usual reactions to military operations, when there is virtually always a "rally 'round the flag" effect and positive poll numbers, in the short term at least. 

Why does this matter? 

• This kind of thing is way too important for a president to be lying or cracking jokes about. 

• If the operation had accomplished its goals then telling the truth would have been enough.

• American national security is more important than any attempt to boost Trump's popularity.  

• If Donald Trump truly believes he has information about secret Iranian schemes that nobody else in 18 different intelligence agencies knows about, he's delusional and should be removed from office.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He shared some thoughts on his own budget proposal.

Trump is taking his usual long weekend at one of his private luxury golf resorts, after a hard week of complaining that Americans take too many vacation days. But he found time to post some thoughts about the budget to his private microblogging site:

I HATE “GREEN TAX CREDITS” IN THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL. They are largely a giant SCAM. I would much prefer that this money be used somewhere else, including reductions. “Anywhere” would be preferable! Windmills, and the rest of this “JUNK,” are the most expensive and inefficient energy in the world, is destroying the beauty of the environment, and is 10 times more costly than any other energy. None of it works without massive government subsidy (energy should NOT NEED SUBSIDY!). Also, it is almost exclusively made in China!!! It is time to break away, finally, from this craziness!!!

As is usually the case in such rants, a lot of this is just false. All sectors of the energy industry are subsidized, from ethanol made from subsidized corn, to oil and gas leases sold for pennies on the dollar, to straight cash infusions for nuclear plants. And Trump's bizarre fixation on "windmills," which he genuinely believes cause cancer, is well known. But it's unusual for a sitting president to call his own budget bill a "SCAM."

Of course, Trump is entitled to his opinions about whether the roughly $12 billion set aside for such credits would be better spent elsewhere. To put that number in perspective, lets say that this symbol represented the cost of those credits

•

which are for property upgrades making Americans' homes more energy-efficient, wage boosts for workers apprenticing in construction and green energy jobs, and building new electrical grid capacity for cheap renewable source. These sorts of things tend to be extremely popular with Americans, even if some of the people they benefit—like Trump's political patron, Tesla CEO Elon Musk—are not.

The $4.5 trillion in the tax cuts Trump does like in his own bill, which are mostly straight cash returns to the very wealthiest Americans would look like this:

 

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Why does this matter?

• Trump could have done something about this months ago if he'd been paying attention to who was using his authority and to what end.

• The problem most Americans have with this budget isn't that it doesn't reflect Trump's priorities, but that it does.

 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He announced his third flip-flop on deporting farm workers in two weeks.

Last Tuesday, ICE agents chased migrant farm workers through strawberry fields in California in large, coordinated raids that yielded a few detentions. The context for those highly publicized raids is complicated, but important. While ICE rarely targeted agricultural workers in the past, its senior officials were under threat from Trump's advisor Stephen Miller to increase the number of deportations to meet a daily quota. 

Miller's ability to dictate policies to Trump had recently increased, thanks to the spectacular falling out between Trump and Elon Musk. Miller, an ethnonationalist and immigration hardliner in spite of coming from a refugee family himself, has been infuriated by Trump's failure to successfully deport nearly as many undocumented immigrants as the Biden administration did last year.  

Then last Thursday, as public reaction began to swell against his chaotic and pointedly cruel immigration actions—as well as his decision to deploy Marines against American protestors—Trump completely reversed his position. Without mentioning that his own policy was the reason why, he declared that "farmers are being hurt badly" and promised not to conduct deportation raids against the agricultural sector. (He also exempted the hospitality sector, where he himself has employed undocumented migrants.)

Yesterday, Trump's DHS secretary, Tom Homan, announced that raids against agricultural and hospitality venues would continue—as they had, continuously, in spite of Trump's announcement. Homan's announcement coincided with reports of increasing alarm from farmers about crops going to waste.

Today, Trump took his fourth position in eleven days, once again claiming that he was "looking at doing something" that would allow farmers to hire undocumented workers without interference. 

Or, in other words, an amnesty.

Why does this matter?

• As this site noted the last week, there's no reason to think Trump will remember what he's said tomorrow. 

• There's also no reason to think Trump is actually in control of his own administration. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He complained that Americans take too many days off.

Trump had two items on his work schedule today. One of them was highly unusual, for him: he received an intelligence briefing, something that is available to him every day of his presidency, and which he almost always skips. (He may have skipped this one, too: just because something appeared on his schedule doesn't mean it happened, or that he was paying attention to it.) He also spent a few minutes greeting a new ambassador.

As is his usual habit, the rest of his work day was—to put it generously—unstructured and unaccounted for. Of course, not every moment of a president's day can or should be visible to the general public, but in Trump's case, his "executive time" is mostly watching television, posting to social media, chatting with personal friends on the phone, or napping.

For example, Trump posted to his private microblogging website a dozen times today during business hours. But even after all that, he still found the time and energy to complain this evening that Americans don't work enough.

Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed. The workers don’t want it either! Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! 

What appears to be upsetting Trump is that today is Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States. It has been a federal holiday since 2021, when President Biden signed a declaration adding the federal government observance to the 47 states that already celebrated it. 

Trump seems to have forgotten that, in 2020, he falsely took credit for anyone celebrating Juneteenth in the first place, saying that nobody had heard about it before he made it "very famous." He also seems to have forgotten that he campaigned in 2020 on making Juneteenth a national holiday—something he could have done at any point during his presidency.

Trump's rant aside, most Americans did not get the day off from work today. Some banks and most financial markets were closed, and there was no regular mail delivery. Most federal employees either got a vacation day or credit towards a personal day. Ironically, that includes the many thousands of federal workers that Trump haphazardly attempted to purge and who are now in a state of paid limbo while courts try to untangle the resulting mess. Very few private sector businesses closed.

Trump has spent 59 of the 151 days since he returned to office at one of his golf resorts, or 39% of his second term.

Why does this matter?

• "I don't like this holiday celebrating the end of slavery in America" is a hell of a look for the President of the United States.  

• Holidays from work are actually pretty popular, for Americans who have the kinds of jobs where they actually have to show up to them most days. 

• Presidents who nap in glass White Houses shouldn't throw stones.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said nobody knows what his plans are for Iran, which may very well include him.

Asked today about the growing Iran-Israel crisis and whether he intended to bring the United States into the war, Trump smiled, joked about nosy reporters, and then gave a coy answer: "I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” 

There are two ways to interpret Trump's remarks. 

The first is that "nobody" includes him. Trump is uniquely vulnerable in this situation, in ways no other American president would be, because he has been politically co-opted by both sides of the conflict at once. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister, boxed Trump in by forcing him to endorse Israel's initial attack, even though it was done without consulting the United States and blew up Trump's last-minute attempt at diplomacy in the process. (The State Department's instantaneous response was that it had been done without US involvement, but Trump told a different story the next day, apparently so that he wouldn't look weak and out of the loop.)

But Iran is a military ally of Russia, and Trump is personally and politically beholden to the Putin regime no matter what the consequences for the United States. 

Domestic politics won't help Trump decide either. A substantial majority of the American people—including a majority of Trump voters—do not want the United States to get involved in a war with Iran, and keeping the country out of foreign entanglements was one of Trump's main campaign themes. But politics are transactional for Trump, and voters can't give him anything now. 

Meanwhile, there are hardliners in Trump's party who have been calling for war with Iran for years, and with many other wedge issues splintering his Congressional base of support already, he can't easily afford to alienate them.

The second possibility is that Trump does know what he intends to do (or is going to be forced to do), and is simply trying to draw attention to himself. Trump has covered for flip-flops, embarrassments, and outright mistakes before by insisting that he was merely pretending to be unstable or incompetent. 

In fact, he's tried to rationalize his behavior that way in another nuclear crisis—sort of. In 2017, after suddenly escalating tensions with North Korea, he retweeted a Fox News host's explanation: that he was acting erratically on purpose, to keep his adversaries off guard. 

Of course, if that's your actual strategy, it tends to work better if you don't announce it.

Why does this matter?

• It shouldn't be this hard to think that a president contemplating a Middle East war has any clue about what he's doing. 

• You cannot have national security unless that's actually a priority for the president.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He ignored experts on the Iranian nuclear program in a crisis over the Iranian nuclear program.

Days after being effectively forced by the Netanyahu government to endorse its attacks on Iran, Trump was asked today about his latest swerve in policy where that country's nuclear ambitions are concerned.

REPORTER: You've always said that you don't believe Iran should be able to have a nuclear weapon, but how close do you personally think that they were to getting one, because [Trump's Director of National Intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard—

TRUMP: Very close.

REPORTER: Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said that Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon.

TRUMP: I don't care what she said. 

Normally, there would be good reason to mistrust what Tulsi Gabbard said about intelligence in her capacity as Director of National Intelligence. A former Democrat, she was appointed by Trump after she endorsed him in 2024. Gabbard is one of the few American politicians whose connections to the Putin regime in Russia are as overt and troubling as Trump's, and she has repeatedly spread disinformation and conspiracy theories that were debunked by the very same intelligence agencies she now leads.

But when Gabbard testified to Congress in March that the United States intelligence community did not believe that Iran was attempting to manufacture a nuclear weapon, she appears to have been accurately summarizing the consensus. 

Gabbard's statement would have been written by actual intelligence professionals. The statement itself is subtly critical of the role that Trump himself played in setting up the current crisis, which is the result of Trump's 2018 abandonment of the JCPOA, the international pact that kept Iran from being able to stockpile enriched uranium. This means that Iran now has the ability to decide to assemble a nuclear weapon on short notice, but not necessarily that it sees doing so as to its advantage—yet.

In other words, Trump's decision to suddenly treat Iran as though it was just about to acquire a nuclear weapon—even though it isn't—is the result of Trump himself having effectively given Iran that option in the first place.

Why does this matter?

• The United States' national security needs to be based on facts, not whatever it's convenient for a president to believe at any given moment. 

• This is a situation where it'd really be helpful if a president actually read his intelligence briefings.

• One reason not to appoint unqualified cronies to critical national security positions is that they discredit the work that actual experts do. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He attended the G7, briefly, in his usual way.

The G7 is an annual summit meeting of seven industrialized nations—the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—plus the European Union. It is being hosted by Canada this year, and Trump was in attendance, although he made an abrupt and unscheduled end to the visit before it was over.

The G7 is emotionally fraught territory for Trump. Its leaders are from the nations most able and willing to push back against him, and he has not handled having to listen to criticism—even of the diplomatic variety to his face. 

In fact, today's sudden departure (ostensibly to monitor the unfolding Iran catastrophe) was at least the third time he has stormed out of the G7 early. In 2019, he rage-quit the London meeting after video leaked of other leaders in attendance poking fun at Trump's habit of chasing the spotlight. As this site put it at the time:

It's not news to anyone else that world leaders think Trump is dangerous, mentally ill, ridiculous, or easily manipulated—because they've said so. But Trump himself, whose staff works very hard to keep him from seeing news that will upset him, may actually have been caught by surprise.

And in 2018, he left the Montreal meeting early and angrily withdrew the United States from a generic statement of goodwill between the participants because Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had refused to submit to his demands in his first-term trade war.

In every G7 meeting Trump has attended, he's complained loudly and bitterly that Russia is no longer a member of the group. Here was today's version:

You know, they, they don't talk — Putin speaks to me, he doesn't speak to anybody else, he doesn't want to talk — 'cause he was very insulted when he got thrown out of the G8. As, uh, I would be, as you would be, as anybody would be, he's very insulted. And, uh, when he was thrown out, by Trudeau, who convinced one or two people along with Obama, he was thrown out, and he's, uh, not a happy person about it, I can tell you that. Basically, he basically doesn't even speak to the people who threw him out. And I agree with him.

In reality, the Putin regime was uninvited in 2014 by every other G7 nation because of its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea. The Canadian Prime Minister at the time was Stephen Harper, a member of the Conservative Party. Justin Trudeau, of the Liberal Party, did not take office for another 19 months after that. 

The G7 is, by definition, a meeting of allies, and only Trump—who sees politics in personal transactional terms and has profited both financially and politically from Russia's assistance—considers Putin an ally.

A few minutes later, as Trump was warming to the theme of his intention to send more federal troops and immigration raids into the American cities that are "the core of the Democrat Power Center," Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney jumped in front of him and called an abrupt, if polite, halt to the press availability.

Shortly after that, Trump abruptly left the meeting a day early. But it wasn't all bad feelings: Trump also announced that he was willing to make concessions to the UK in his ongoing attempt to win a trade war against the entire world because "I like them. That’s why. That’s the ultimate protection."

UPDATE: Later in the evening, Trump insisted that French President Emmanuel Macron was wrong about why he left the meeting early, even though Macron was giving the same (relatively flattering) explanation Trump's own White House did. 

Trump did not offer any alternative explanation, so if there was a reason other than managing his own emotional needs, then Macron is not alone in having "no idea."

Why does this matter?

• Presidents who are too emotionally fragile to sit through a whole day of meetings with people who don't have to kiss their ass should probably find another line of work. 

• It's a problem that one of the only issues Trump seems to be able to consistently focus on is how to help Russia. 

• Trump trying to sound like a mob boss running a protection racket is all the more embarrassing given his history with actual mob bosses. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He made sure to politicize a political assassination.

Yesterday, two Minnesota state legislators and their spouses were shot by a man posing as a police officer. Former Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were killed. State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were seriously wounded.

The only suspect, Vance Luther Boelter, is still at large as of this post.

Minnesota's governor Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice-president, called the shootings "a political assassination." Boelter's car and house contained lists of Democratic politicians and leaders in pro-choice organizations. There were also indications he'd planned to attack the anti-Trump rallies that were to be held at various locations in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. (Many of those were officially canceled, but thousands of people swarmed the Minnesota state capitol grounds anyway.)

Assassinations of high-ranking state officials would normally prompt an extraordinary federal response to augment state investigations. Asked today whether Trump had spoken with Walz to help coordinate those efforts, Trump said this:

Well, it's a terrible thing. I think he's a terrible governor. I think he's a grossly incompetent person. But I may, I may call him, I may call other people too. 

This is actually restrained by Trump's standards in similar situations. He pointedly ignored a politically-motivated arson attack on the residence of Pennsylvania's Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, for a week. He's enjoyed publicly floating the idea of a pardon for six men convicted of an attempted kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan's Democratic governor. And when a man planning to kill former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi broke into her house and seriously injured her husband Paul, Trump made crude jokes about it for years afterwards. 

Why does this matter?

• Trump's personal opinions aren't supposed to matter when it comes to doing the basics of his job. 

• Ignoring or tolerating crimes against political enemies is what dictators do.

Today is June 14. It is, among other things, Donald Trump's birthday, and as you may have heard, he made the Army throw him a parade. It happened—but given how badly he seems to want the attention, just this once, let's look at what people who aren't Donald Trump did today.

What did people who aren't Donald Trump do today?

Quite a lot, actually, all over the United States of America.

Beachgoers in San Francisco made some art.

 

In Atlanta, people were turned away from Liberty Plaza when it reached its capacity of 5,000.

Boise's capitol grounds were bustling.

Thousands of people rallied in downtown Minneapolis, in spite of warnings that the man who impersonated a police officer and murdered one Democratic legislator and her husband, and shot another and his wife, was still at large and planning to target a rally.

In West Palm Beach, citizens got as good a look at Mar-a-Lago as you can get without paying a million dollars a year for a membership. (For some reason, the bridge leading right up to it was blocked.)

In Arlington, some folks celebrated the Army's 250th birthday.

Versatile character actor and anti-war activist Mark Ruffalo, best known for his starring role opposite Channing Tatum in the sports thriller Foxcatcher, was mobbed by fans on the streets of Manhattan.

It was a beautiful, sunny day in Homer, Alaska (pop. 5,000).

Bostonians stood up for trans rights in a Pride parade.

In Starkville, Mississippi, a tiny little dog and her person spoke out against dangerous and cruel cuts to Medicaid.

In Philadelphia, someone put together a budget proposal for the administration to consider.

They pondered theology in Tallahassee.

 

In Cincinnati, some friends went for a stroll.

A woman in Gig Harbor, Washington, had some thoughts about fish. 

Residents in Gulfport, Mississippi coordinated their parasols.

Dolores Taylor of Denver got out and enjoyed the sun. 

Folks enjoyed novelty balloons in Los Angeles.

Approximately 2,000 marches, rallies, sit-ins, gatherings, and other forms of protest took place in big cities, small towns, and tiny villages all over the United States today, which is also Flag Day. Millions of Americans took part in them.

It wasn't all happy news today in America, though. Washington, DC hoteliers were lamenting unseasonably low occupancy rates for a June weekend with the Nationals playing at home. (The Nats dropped their seventh game in a row, 4-3, in a day game in front of a crowd of 21,129.)

Why does this matter?

• It matters because Americans can and still do exercise their rights to free speech and freedom of assembly no matter how much their government might wish they wouldn't.