There’s a new DHS boss in town. Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin was confirmed last night to lead the Department of Homeland Security on a near-party line vote, with Sen. Rand Paul opposing his confirmation and two Democrats—Sens. John Fetterman and Martin Heinrich—crossing over to support him. Kristi Noem is now free to take over her totally real, totally important new job as special envoy for the “Shield of the Americas,” which Trump announced while firing her and seems not to have thought of once since. Happy Tuesday.
Muttering Through the Crisis
by Andrew Egger
The last few days of developments have been pivotal for the war in Iran. On the bright side, the conflict seems momentarily to have stopped metastasizing: At any rate, it’s been a few days since we saw any of the attacks on energy production infrastructure that last week threatened to send the conflict spiraling out of control.
But Iran seems no closer to capitulation than before. If anything, they have strengthened their negotiating position: They stared down Trump’s 48-hour weekend ultimatum, and Trump blinked. The campaign to force the Strait of Hormuz open hasn’t yet succeeded, and short of dramatic military escalation—boots on the ground—it’s not clear what cards he has left to play to reopen it without Iran’s blessing. After their euphoric initial response to Trump’s announcement yesterday of “productive talks” with Iran, markets gradually sank throughout the afternoon as it settled in that the economic situation remains as dire as before.
In this high-stakes moment, how did Trump choose to spend his Monday? With a jaunt to Memphis, Tennessee, to brag about his record on crime, tell a bunch of long, meandering stories, and visit Elvis Presley’s home at Graceland. If any of the mullahs happened to catch the speech, it’s hard to imagine it left them shaking in their boots.
Trump had a few things to say about the situation in Iran during his remarks to the Memphis Safe Task Force, a federal law enforcement operation that began in the city last fall. He repeated his morning announcement that he had temporarily postponed “planned strikes against major energy and electricity targets in Iran” and said vaguely that “with Iran, we’ve been negotiating for a long time, and this time they mean business.” He again spoke wistfully about the economic numbers he was getting before the conflict began: “We can keep going and get that [Dow Jones] 50,000 up to 55 and 60 and no end. Or we can take a stop and make a little journey into the Middle East and eliminate a big problem.”
And he even apportioned out a bit of shared responsibility, turning to his defense secretary: “And, uh, Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up, and you said, ‘Let’s do it.’” There may be no better indication that the president is experiencing a little bomber’s remorse: When things are going well, Trump’s not exactly one to share credit.
Trump’s remarks on Iran were brief, however. For the most part, he stuck to his comfort zone: the same shopworn boasts and insults he’s rolled out a hundred times before, the same unshakable conviction that—polls be damned—the American people are behind him one hundred percent. The president said that his takeover of D.C. law enforcement has been a scintillating success, claiming that he is constantly beset by grateful young women who tell him it’s safe to walk around the city again. He did his usual two-bit comedy shtick about Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: “I mean, he’s a Palestinian. He should be fighting on the side of Palestine. He’s actually become a Palestinian leader.” He did his usual bit of braggery about how nobody names bills like him: “You know, they called it the SAVE Act. . . . I said, you have to call it—you have to, under any circumstances, call it the ‘SAVE America Act,’ because everybody knows what that is.”
Most tellingly, he offered his belief—which seems to get stronger all the time—that he has no genuine popular domestic opposition. On some of the culture-war issues he’s pushing, he said, his people should stop describing them as “80/20 issues”: “They’re not 80/20. They’re 99/1.”
He looked old, and he seemed tired. His speech slurred. More than anything else, he seemed utterly unattuned to the many crises that are all piling up around his many careless decisions. He finished speaking, everybody else at the table took turns lavishing him with praise, and then it was time to head to Graceland.
We’ve made the point many times during Trump’s second term, but it bears repeating: There’s little reason to believe that any of this is an affectation. Trump is a lifelong pathological solipsist. He’s fed that solipsism by vacuum-packing himself in an information environment of buttery flattery, spending his days marinating in the most over-the-top praise both in person and online. And it hasn’t helped that, as he’s gotten older, he’s seemingly fallen prey to the same tendencies that many old people do: the strongest parts of his personality just keep getting stronger. Any day now, he seems genuinely to believe, it’s all gonna turn around. Everybody just wait and see. The golden age is mere moments away.
As Trump gets older and more doddering, will things get better or worse? Let us know what you think.
Momentum Won’t Capitalize on Itself
by William Kristol
In politics as in sports, momentum—though hard to quantify, always imprecise, and certainly changeable—is a real thing. A couple of mistakes leave your opponent in some disarray. A couple of things click for you and the wind’s at your back. Suddenly you’ve got what George H.W. Bush called “the ‘Big Mo.’”
But the key is to take advantage of the moment, because who knows who long the momentum will last? Bush claimed he had the Big Mo after his upset victory in the 1980 Iowa caucuses. He lost the New Hampshire primary a month later to Ronald Reagan, and the Big Mo dissipated.
The democratic opposition to the Trump administration has momentum. Trump’s Iran war has turned out to be unsuccessful and unpopular. Yesterday morning Trump signaled retreat. We don’t know if we’re actually heading toward a deal with Iran. We don’t know if Trump will reverse course again this week. But for now at least Trump has blinked.
It’s important to take advantage of the moment. It’s important to hold Trump accountable for his reckless and incompetent war and to emphasize its human, economic, and geopolitical costs. It’s important to discredit its architects like Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio. And it’s important to try to ensure that Trump can’t reverse his reversal, and to work to prevent more such unilateral “excursions.”
And now it looks as if Trump is also blinking in the fight over the Department of Homeland Security.
Last weekend, Trump killed a deal to fund all of DHS—including the Transportation Security Administration—but with no new funds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. Republicans would have worked to pass that ICE component through a separate piece of legislation that would require only 50 votes in the Senate. And that two-step process seemed to be enough. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) confirmed on Sunday that Republican senators were ready to accept the Democrats’ offer. That is, until Trump said no: “It would have worked. We could have had TSA paid by the end of the week, but the president said, ‘No deal.’”
But last night Republican senators returned from a meeting in the White House saying that Trump now seems willing to accept the deal he’d blocked the day before—though it remains to be seen what is the precise language of the proposed legislation. Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), chair of the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, told reporters she believed they had a solution to ending the shutdown. “I’m going to be working through the night, so hopefully we can land this plane,” she said.
It should go without saying that until the plane is landed, Democrats need to make clear that Trump is responsible for the chaos at airports. It should also go without saying that afterwards they need to continue to make clear that Trump was responsible for the chaos, and that if left unchecked, he’ll create chaos again.
The key is not simply to pocket victories. The key is to take advantage of them, to build on them, to create more momentum out of them, to turn Trump’s retreat into a rout.
This won’t be easy. Trump still has major assets and formidable levers of power at his disposal, and subordinates and allies willing and eager to use them—especially with respect to the 2026 elections. Trump is focused on muscling through Congress the SAVE Act, whose sole purpose is to put a heavy thumb on the scale on behalf of the GOP in 2026 and beyond. And Steve Bannon said yesterday that “we can use this, ICE helping at airports, as a test run, a test case, to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterms.”
The biggest fights are ahead. It’s good to go into them with momentum. It would be even better to capitalize on that momentum, and win them.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The 2026 Midterms Are Critical. But 2032 Could Be Existential… If Democrats don’t lock in key strategic successes soon, after the next census they could face a long stretch in the wilderness, argues STEVE SCHALE.
The Hidden Risks of Trump’s Threats Against Iran’s Power Plants… It’s not just about Iran. It’s about us, observes MARK HERTLING.
Why Tech Titans Love Trump and Hate ‘Introspection’... Silicon Valley’s “builders” love the president who’s destroying everything, writes MATT JOHNSON.
Trump’s Iran Ultimatum… MARK HERTLING, BEN PARKER, and MARGARET DONOVAN recorded a live Command Post episode on Trump’s threats of massive war crimes against Iran—and the broader ethics and legality of the conflict.
Quick Hits
THE TONGUE-BATH OLYMPICS: Andrew wrote above about the warm bath of lackey flattery in which Trump’s brain is slowly dissolving, and we’ve got to dwell on one more moment from the Memphis roundtable to really drive it home. When it came his turn to speak, Stephen Miller spent nearly three minutes squirming with rapture over Trump’s accomplishments: his “vision, courage, and determination,” his “greatest national security and public safety team in American history,” the “national miracle” of his crackdown on crime, and his “largest reduction in illegal immigration in American history.”
“If we had an honest media in this country,” Miller said, all these accomplishments “would be shared 24/7 on the news.”
Trump ate it all up. When Miller was finished, it was FBI Director Kash Patel’s turn to speak. Trump turned to him: “So, Kash, see if you can top that! I don’t know, that’s a tough one, Kash.” Kash did his best.
TOM TERRIFIC: Heaven knows it’s not the most important thing going on, but billionaire Tom Steyer’s latest attempt to launch himself into Democratic party politics is one of the funnier ongoing subplots of the young election season. Back in 2020, the hedge funder spent $250 million of his own money on a presidential campaign that ended up netting zero delegates. Now, he’s running for governor of California, where he’s once again unlikely to win. This time, however, he seems determined to drag a fellow Dem or two down with him: He’s been petitioning the state government to bar the frontrunner, Rep. Eric Swalwell, from the ballot on the grounds that the California lawmaker actually lives in Washington, D.C.
Yesterday, Steyer sat for an interview with California political reporter Ashley Zavala, who asked him what seemed to be a straightforward question: How would Steyer grade the job performance of Gov. Gavin Newsom? “I don’t know,” Steyer laughed repeatedly, saying he thinks a lot of people appreciate how Newsom had “stood up” for California. And then: “I haven’t followed it closely enough to give him a grade.”
Cheap Shots
I met Elvis' ghost. Big ghost. Famous ghost. Almost as famous as me. He had tears in his eyes. He said he had been afraid to haunt Graceland for years. Too scary, he said. But he's back now because it's safe. I made Memphis safe for the things I see in my mind again.
Andrew: "After their euphoric initial response to Trump’s announcement yesterday of “productive talks” with Iran, markets gradually sank throughout the afternoon as it settled in that the economic situation remains as dire as before."
I'm not sure "euphoric" is the correct word. Maybe "credulous" is better, because the markets always make the mistake of taking Trump at his word when in reality no one should ever take him at his word. I did see someone made a killing on the S&P futures market yesterday, so maybe the "correct" people made their money yesterday.