Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: After threatening a resumption of major military action against Iran this week, Donald Trump abruptly reversed course yesterday, saying that no more strikes were necessary because negotiators had made some breakthroughs and a peace deal was now imminent. Iran, by contrast, said no deal had been made. But the state-owned news agency was reporting this morning the contours of the deal that are—shall we say—unrealistically unfavorable to Trump.
Will it happen? Who knows. One of these days, predictions of an imminent deal may end up being true. Happy Friday.
Join Catherine Rampell and JVL on Substack and YouTube at 12:30 p.m. EDT today for Receipts Live.
Circuses and Circuses
by William Kristol
Near the beginning of his great biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, Winston Churchill takes a few pages to sketch for his readers “the differences of feeling and outlook which separate the men and women” of his time from ours. The first difference he cites? “They gave a very high—indeed, a dominating—place in their minds to religion. It played as large a part in the life of the seventeenth century as sport does now.”
Now sports may not be quite as central for us as Churchill (perhaps a bit sardonically) suggests, but they are a big deal—as we Knicks fans would be the last to deny.
And that’s my apology for remarking this morning on this coming Sunday night’s Ultimate Fighting Championship spectacle on the South Lawn of the White House, part of the administration’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of our independence. No, the UFC event is not as important as the war in Iran, or the economy, or the 2026 elections. But I do think it’s an event that captures something about this moment in our history.
After all, it’s vulgar, it’s violent, it’s commercial, it’s grandiose, it’s tacky, and it dishonors a place once thought worthy of care and respect. In other words, it’s Donald Trump.
Yesterday, the New York Times’s White House correspondent Shawn McCreesh attended a preview tour of the event site offered by the Trump administration.
They came to see the Claw.
The White House welcomed reporters and influencers from around the world onto the South Lawn for half an hour on Thursday morning to inspect the towering, claw-like superstructure that has been built there for the Ultimate Fighting Championship bout that President Trump is hosting on his 80th birthday this weekend. Jack Posobiec, the right-wing commentator best known for spreading the “Pizzagate” paranoia, stood with a White House official next to the octagonal ring down in the nexus of the claw and looked around in awe. “It’s literally Vegas,” Mr. Posobiec said excitedly. “Vegas is in D.C. now!”
From the “star-spangled jumbo claw” to the “clusters of klieg lights affixed to each of the four curving appendages high overhead” to the “massive television screens hanging from every corner,” it’s quite the scene. And I’ll admit that McCreesh’s observation that it all “towers over the old willow oaks and magnolia trees planted long ago by past presidents on the gentle slope of the South Lawn . . . and towering over the White House itself” induced in me a feeling of melancholy.
It’s a feeling that was only intensified by his description of the cage itself:
an eight-sided feat of marketeering, its every angle prominently displaying the name of some sponsor who’d paid big bucks to have their brands juxtaposed against the ultimate backdrop: Live Trade on Polymarket . . . Bud Light . . . Pit Boss Grills . . . Total Wireless . . . Dial #Law Morgan & Morgan . . . Toyo Tires.
The words “crypto.com” were carved into each little metal step leading into the ring.
One can’t help but think that this is surely what the decline and fall of a republic looks like.
Or—maybe it’s just what a low water mark looks like, one from which we are going to rise again?
After all, a Reuters/Ipsos poll out yesterday found that only 16 percent of Americans thought it appropriate for President Trump to hold mixed martial arts cage matches at the White House on Sunday to celebrate U.S. history and his 80th birthday. Forty-six percent said it was inappropriate, and the rest didn’t offer an opinion.
There are other grounds for hope. Other sports are happening across our fair land. The Knicks and the Spurs play Saturday night—and if necessary, Tuesday and then, if necessary again, Friday night—for the NBA championship. There will be, I’m told, World Cup soccer matches. And there’ll be baseball across the country this weekend—from the majors to kids’ leagues to pick up games on random fields of grass.
Maybe it remains the case, as the historian Jacques Barzun remarked in 1954, that “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” In a modern spirit of open-mindedness, I’ll add basketball and football, and the new-found popularity of soccer. I’m willing to extend the list to a host of other sports—even to mixed martial arts.
But on the South Lawn of the White House?
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Great Books Are for Everybody… An unlikely champion of the canon urges readers not to think of the books as “belonging” to conservatives, reviews CATHY YOUNG.
Trump’s Firehose of Lies… ANNE APPLEBAUM joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to discuss how Donald Trump is using the Putinesque tactic of flooding people with contradictory stories to confuse and exhaust them so they’ll just tune out.
The Wild West of 1980s Movie Financing… PETER M. HOFFMAN joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss his new book, Karmic Winds, and the rise and fall of Carolco.
Bulwark Book Club for July: Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic. Be sure to get your copy of LINDSAY CHERVINSKY’s book, either at your favorite bookseller (or the library) so you can get your questions in for our second episode of Bulwark Book Club with MONA CHAREN!
Quick Hits
702 LITTLE TOO LATE: All week, House and Senate Democrats have been telling Republicans: If you want our votes to reauthorize FISA surveillance powers, you need to get Donald Trump to withdraw his spectacularly unqualified and politicized selection for acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte. Having received no such assurances from Trump, the House went into recess yesterday without reauthorizing the program, which will therefore expire today.
Bizarrely, Trump waited until after the window to reauthorize FISA had passed before announcing he had chosen his permanent nominee for DNI: Jay Clayton, who is now serving as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Trump has given no indication he will withdraw Pulte from the acting job he has yet to assume. But announcing Clayton earlier might have made it easier for congressional Republicans to soften Democrats up in FISA negotiations this week. Guess we’ll never know.
Clayton, more than most of the figures Trump has surrounded himself with in his second term, is something of an establishment type who’s learned to thrive in Trump world. He served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term, a post to which he was confirmed on a bipartisan basis.
Still, there are reasons to be skeptical. It isn’t obvious that Clayton, a longtime corporate attorney, has the “extensive national security experience” the law requires of the DNI. And he has been far too willing to indulge Trump’s conspiratorial thinking when he feels it useful, especially on TV when he thinks the president might be watching. “Though prosecutors, particularly Manhattan U.S. attorneys, traditionally go out of their way to sidestep discussing anything even vaguely political,” Erica Orden writes in Politico today, “Clayton has used the segments to dismiss concerns about Trump’s ‘anti-weaponization fund’ and float the possibility of fraud in Los Angeles’s recent mayoral primary.”
MORE ON OIL: Yesterday, we briefly contemplated the global economy’s current biggest oddity: If the Strait of Hormuz is still mostly bottled up, how has the price of oil remained so (relatively) reasonable? Yesterday, Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas tallied up ten reasons why oil is still below $100 a barrel, including (as we mentioned yesterday) the quick release of hundreds of millions of barrels from global strategic reserves, the fact that some oil is still getting past the Hormuz bottleneck, and the fact that the world market was actually oversupplied before the crisis began. But the biggest factor, Blas writes, is China—which has been able to lower global demand by dramatically slashing its oil imports, in ways we don’t fully understand:
Beijing has managed to slash its oil imports, providing a massive—and unexpected—relief valve. Last month, China imported 6.7 million barrels a day of crude via tanker, down nearly 40% from the 2025 average, according to Vortexa, a market intelligence firm. That drop of 4 million barrels a day is roughly equivalent to the consumption of Germany and France combined. . . .
If Beijing was buying as much oil as it did in the past, prices would be much higher, global inflation would be rampant and central banks would be forced to hike interest rates quickly, panicking stock markets. Donald Trump would also be in a far weaker position in his talks with the Iranians. In short: China has essentially bailed out both the global economy and the political fortunes of the US president.
WARGAMING THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO: Nobody knows whether Donald Trump will move aggressively to try to steal this year’s midterm elections, but he’s sure been acting like a guy who’s interested in giving it a shot. Elected Democrats, Politico reports, aren’t just sitting around waiting to see:
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine other Democratic senators huddled with top party election experts last week to drill responses to a range of extreme scenarios—from federal agents at polling locations, to ballot seizures in key battlegrounds, to foreign interference operations—that they fear could become reality pre- and post-Election Day.
They game-planned legal injunctions to bar armed federal agents or armed citizens from voting sites, and lawsuits to force the Trump administration to return ballots if they’re confiscated in key contests that could decide control of Congress. They also choreographed communication strategies across elected leaders, campaigns and advocacy groups to combat misinformation and disinformation designed to sow distrust in the results, according to details of the tabletop exercises shared exclusively with POLITICO.
“Trump has talked about stealing the election, violating the election, perverting the election, over and over again. And woe be us, and woe be anyone who believes in free elections, who doesn’t take that seriously,” Schumer said in a phone interview earlier this week. “We are going to be prepared for anything that he throws at us.”
Cheap Shots
"After all, it’s vulgar, it’s violent, it’s commercial, it’s grandiose, it’s tacky, and it dishonors a place once thought worthy of care and respect. In other words, it’s Donald Trump."
Well put!
"There are other grounds for hope. Other sports are happening across our fair land. The Knicks and the Spurs play Saturday night—and if necessary, Tuesday and then, if necessary again, Friday night—for the NBA championship. There will be, I’m told, World Cup soccer matches."
How's this for grounds for hope? A quick check at the DC forecast, and currently we're looking at a high of 90 with possible evening thunderstorms for Sunday. If JVL is right, this whole apparatus they built on the lawn is basically a lightning magnet, so it might derail the whole thing. Zeus, I'm counting on you!
I am afraid I have fallen into the trap outlined by Anne Applebaum in her interview with Tim Miller yesterday - that is, information overseen by this administration is so chaotic and contradictory that I no longer pay attention to it. I often don't even read stories that begin with anything like "Trump says..." or "According to the Trump administration..." especially if it's about the Iran war.
Applebaum believes this is a tool favored by Trump, Putin, and their ilk in order to get folks to just throw up their hands and say "No one knows what's going on" and tune out everything. Fortunately, we have The Bulwark to alert us to news that might actually mean something.
Thanks again, guys!