Thanks to their operational control of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran was able to get away with murder in setting the terms of further peace talks with the United States—and now they’re pushing for even more. The first round of scheduled peace talks under the new memorandum of understanding were supposed to begin in Switzerland today, but Iran abruptly called them off yesterday, citing the intensifying conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, which they deemed a violation of the MOU’s terms. This morning (eastern time) the Republican Guard Corps Navy—which Trump claims doesn’t exist—once again closed the strait. The message was clear: If you want to negotiate, you’d better figure out how to get Israel in line. Happy Friday.
Join JVL and Catherine Rampell at 12:30 p.m. EDT today for Receipts Live. Watch on Substack or YouTube.
Celebrate Juneteenth. Annoy MAGA.
by William Kristol
Today is Juneteenth, a holiday long celebrated, especially by black Americans, to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. In 2021, Congress, recognizing that the end of slavery was an event worthy of formal recognition by the whole nation, established it as a federal holiday for all Americans. The holiday’s name refers to June 19, 1865, the day when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 ordering the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
In the midst of this year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the commemoration of Juneteenth can have special resonance. But not for the Trump administration, which, so far as I can tell, has not deigned to acknowledge the holiday this year. When I searched the White House website this morning for “Juneteenth,” I got back no results found. Nor does there seem to be any presidential proclamation this year in honor of its observance.
The one time the Trump administration seems to have taken notice of Juneteenth was in December of last year, when the administration removed Juneteenth (and MLK Day) from the National Park Service’s list of free-admission days, replacing it with June 14, Flag Day—which is not an official federal holiday. But it is President Trump’s birthday, and that is the holiday he wishes all of us to celebrate, as he celebrated it Sunday with the cage match on the White House lawn.
One understands why Trumpists choose to neglect Juneteenth. After all, Trump’s vice president claimed earlier this week at a campaign event in New York that “they’ve become anti-white in the Democratic party.” If you’re appealing to those who think one of our two major parties is “anti-white,” if you’re trying to convince Americans that anti-whiteness is a great problem, if you’re the party that wants to foster and exploit white grievance, then you have little interest in calling attention to a holiday that is a reminder of the terrible injustices caused by fantasies of white supremacy.
But beyond this, Juneteenth isn’t a holiday that fits into the cartoonishly whitewashed Trumpist view of American history. In his posthumously published Juneteenth, the great American novelist Ralph Ellison has one of his central protagonists, Rev. Alonzo Hickman, say this: “And who can blame those who don’t feel that they have to worry about the complicated truths we have to struggle with? In this country men can be born and live well and die without ever having to feel much of what makes their ease possible.”
Struggling with complicated truths about what has made our ease possible is not a Trumpist thing. To some degree, it has often not been an American thing. As Kevin Levin, who writes the newsletter Civil War Memory, put it this week,
For generations, the history of slavery and emancipation has been minimized, distorted, or simply written out of the national narrative by white Americans. The story of Juneteenth survived because Black families carried it forward, year after year, while the broader culture looked away or invented comforting fictions in its place.
Trump and Vance are not interested in challenging any of those comforting fictions. They spend a good deal of time and effort weaponizing those fictions and turning them into grievances for their own political advantage.
But the rest of us can do what the Trump administration won’t do. We can engage in a struggle with complicated truths that makes possible a truer and deeper celebration of our history.
As Levin writes,
Juneteenth is a federal holiday now. It belongs to the country, which I understand to mean that it belongs to all of us . . . because the story of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom is the central drama of this nation’s history.
So many millions of Americans will commemorate Juneteenth, in local and civic celebrations across the country, even as Trump and Vance ignore the holiday. (For some Juneteenth reading, The Bulwark has an excerpt about “the day freedom came” from Booker T. Washington as well as some vignettes from first-person emancipation narratives.) And two weeks from now we will enjoy July Fourth, ignoring Trump’s sad and frantic attempts to hijack the 250th anniversary and distort its meaning. Celebrating American freedom is always worthwhile. It can be even more so this year if it’s a step on the road to freeing ourselves from the grip of Trumpism.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Juneteenth: ‘The Day of Freedom Came’... On this holiday, take a moment to reflect on some first-person accounts of emancipation from BOOKER T. WASHINGTON and others.
The Man Who Wouldn’t Give Up on Liberty…One revolution made Lafayette a hero. Another nearly destroyed him. CATHY YOUNG on the story of America’s favorite Frenchman.
Trump Still Has a Bad Case of Obama Envy… The double spotlight on his failed Iran war and Obama’s Chicago celebration will make it worse, warns JILL LAWRENCE.
The Mount Rushmore of TV… On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, the Ankler’s RICHARD RUSHFIELD joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss the state of television.
Quick Hits
ISRAEL IN THE HOT SEAT: As we mentioned up top, Iran has seized on President Trump’s obvious desire for immediate peace to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States, its two main adversaries. It seems to be working. Yesterday, Vice President JD Vance called Israel out in the most astonishingly direct terms yet, seeming to accuse Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s government of working deliberately to ruin the peace.
“Israel has the right to defend itself, but fundamentally, the Israelis, just like everybody else, have to respect this peace process,” Vance said.
What the president has grown frustrated [with] sometimes is that we seem to be right on the cusp of a major breakthrough in the agreement, and then all of a sudden there’s a major explosion that goes off in a civilian population center in Beirut, and a lot of people who have nothing to do with Hezbollah lose their lives. That’s not acceptable.
Vance went on to caution Netanyahu’s government against too much public criticism of Trump’s deal. The president, he said, “is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time. And he happens to be the head of state of the world’s superpower.”
“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government,” Vance added, “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally I have anywhere left in the entire world.”
GREEN POOL BLUES: It brings us no pleasure to say this:1 The Reflecting Pool saga keeps getting funnier. After days of furious attempts to kill the algae that had swarmed back into the pool, the Interior Department yesterday veered into North Korean broadcast mode as they attempted to declare the mission accomplished: All the algae had been killed, the Department’s press team tweeted, and it remained necessary only to vacuum it out:
The vacuuming is the final maintenance step after refilling the pool, and it will be complete in a few days. . . . The nanobubbler technology and vacuuming have been incredibly effective, making the water crystal clear with the American Flag Blue coating shining brightly on the bottom of the pool.
As our National Park Service team noted, the Reflecting Pool is now so “blue” that the Fake News Media, which has been staked out at the Reflecting Pool for weeks, has fled!
Well, not quite. A few hours after these tweets, our own Brendan Hartnett and Sarah Matthews scoped out the pool yesterday afternoon, finding it still plenty green with plenty of visible algae. But that wasn’t all: Large flakes of that “American Flag Blue coating” were no longer “shining brightly on the bottom of the pool” at all, but rather floating in the water, having parted company with the pool floor just a couple weeks into their professional service.
Does any of this really matter? No, not really. But given the administration’s inexplicable decision to turn the Reflecting Pool renovation into a referendum on American Greatness and their unique ability to achieve it, it is pretty funny.
WILL GERRYMANDERING SAVE THE GOP?: After coming up the loser in this year’s Total Redistricting War, House Democrats have consoled themselves that Republicans’ gerrymandering gains may be washed out by voter backlash to the whole unsightly affair, particularly among black Americans. But House Republicans are sounding more confident than ever that the maneuver might have saved their majority. “The composition of the House battlefield has completely flipped,” the National Republican Congressional Committee argues in a memo obtained by Politico:
In 2018, Republicans controlled 23 districts that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016 and 42 districts where Trump failed to breach a 50 percent majority.
In 2026, there are instead 23 Democrats representing districts Trump won in 2024, and there are just 14 Republicans representing districts where Trump received less than 50 percent of the vote.
The memo is a notable acknowledgement from the NRCC that the mid-cycle redistricting gamble was worthwhile to shore up the GOP’s House majority, even as the committee largely stayed out of the pressure campaigns in statehouses nationwide, deferring to the White House and Trump’s allies to navigate that push.
Over the first half of 2026, polls tilted more and more lopsidedly in favor of Democrats and against Donald Trump. Republicans have since stabilized a bit, but for now Democrats still enjoy wide advantages in top-level metrics: The generic congressional ballot is D +6.6 in the Silver Bulletin polling average, with Donald Trump’s net approval slightly up from his second-term low of -21.2 at -18.7.
BRAVA MELONI: Say what you will about Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, but she seems to have a stronger grasp of America’s national interest than Donald Trump does. Bloomberg has the story of her putting the president in his place:
President Donald Trump said Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni “begged” him for a joint photo at this week’s G7 summit in France—a claim she called “fully made up.” . . .
“Probably she is happy that I talked to her. I didn’t have to talk to her,” Trump told Italian broadcaster La7 in comments broadcast Friday morning. “She begged me for a picture. She wanted a picture with me so badly. I wouldn’t have done it, but I felt sorry for her.”
Meloni replied immediately from a European Union chiefs’ summit in Brussels.
“Italy and I never beg,” Meloni said in a post on Instagram. “Some things warrant an immediate response. Trump’s remarks are fully made up. I am frankly astounded. I don’t know why the president of the US behaves like this with allies. It’s not the first time it happens. I can only say it’s regrettable he doesn’t have the same determination with the enemies of the West, the enemies of the US, with leaders he’s far more accommodating with.”
No notes.
Cheap Shots
Okay, that was a lie.
Did you feel the breeze yesterday? Wasn’t it refreshing?
The sound of the Obamas speaking was more than a reminder of better times and better people leading us into the future. It was a timely lesson in the value of placing hope over grievance, of feeling uplifting optimism rather than deflating pessimism, of placing love and kindness above constant anger and resentment, of public service being for the benefit of others rather than glory and profit for the self and those enrolled in the friends and family plan.
You didn’t need to be in Chicago to feel the vibe. I was listening on the radio while commuting and could feel instantly the change in mood and tone. Something was in the air, and for a most pleasant moment it was like breathing in the smell of a lilac bush in full bloom in springtime instead of the constantly stale farts that we sadly have become accustomed to inhaling from the turd currently occupying the White House and his enablers. It was a much needed uplifting moment, a return to a time and place not so distant yet which feels like so long ago, before our government, never mind our human decency, were hijacked by a movement that places no value upon it.
After the feel-good moment passed, the obvious question remains: how do we find our way back to that better representation of our better selves? Where is the key to unlock the door to the jail that we all have been placed into, lacking windows to let in necessary disinfecting sunlight? Democrats, please play on a loop highlights of Michelle Obama’s momentous speech as well as Barack’s words of wisdom and insight, as the fall electoral campaign nears. The inspiration is needed if we are to vanquish the forces of greed, selfishness, hatred, and sometimes outright evil that govern us now. We were reminded that hope is okay, that change can happen, and that we can be better without Melania's help, without her husband in control of everything, and minus the others in service to him within the cult.
It is exactly what we needed to hear. Let’s go back, and then go forward. It is time. Make it happen.
The Civil War never ended. We’re still fighting it today. The latest battles are up to us.