Welcome to Friday’s Washington Secrets, where we are ready for another weekend filled with World Cup soccer. Once again, we unleash our two strategists to review the president’s week, and — spoiler alert — it’s not good. Where can I get a copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge?
What a week that was. Even by the extraordinary standards of Donald Trump, that was an all-timer.
It began on Sunday with cage fighting on the South Lawn of the White House to mark the president’s birthday, or maybe to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation. Fighters warmed up in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and some emerged from the Oval Office for their bouts. We later learned that law enforcement agencies thwarted a plot to attack the event with drones.
Trump arrived Monday in the French Alps to meet fellow world leaders at the G7 summit. He arrived with the wind at his back after announcing that a deal had been reached with Iran about the next phase of talks.
Through the week, details emerged of a memorandum of understanding to extend the ceasefire with Iran and set a course for 60 days of negotiations to end the war completely. On Monday, an official said the MOU had been electronically signed a day earlier.
In France, G7 leaders worked to put Ukraine back on the agenda and even managed to get Trump’s sign-off on a new push for peace there, even if he said it was a European problem rather than an American one.
The president then stirred up a hornet’s nest back home with an overnight social media post Wednesday that he was delaying Jay Clayton’s nomination to become director of national intelligence, just hours before his confirmation hearing. It was all part of a complicated game that is driving a wedge between the White House and Senate Republicans, as Trump said that he would not “approve” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act unless the SAVE America Act, mandating photo ID and proof of citizenship to vote, was included.
In the meantime, the text of the MOU was released, raising more questions than it answered. It came out at the same time as Trump was giving a meandering press conference at the G7. The president seemed enthused by his time with world leaders, who praised the MOU. “We found a great deal of unity here at the G7,” Trump said.
Trump was back at the White House on Thursday for a Medal of Honor ceremony. He left it to his vice president to defend the deal with Iran. JD Vance said consumers were already seeing the benefits, with gas prices falling and oil tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz.
The biggest losers? Is it the Israelis? Vance sent them a warning to get on board with the MOU and fast, saying, “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”
The president is due to spend the weekend at Camp David.
So what do our two strategists make of it all?
Jed Babbin: Grade F
The big news of the week is, of course, the “memorandum of understanding” that supposedly ends the war with Iran. It is, like someone else wrote recently, all carrot and no stick. It ends the war not with Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” as the president put it when the war started, but almost purely on Iran’s terms.
The “deal” puts pretty much every one of Trump’s objectives in the war on hold or gives them up entirely. There’s no enforceable agreement with Iran to end its nuclear weapons development. Iran has lied before about it, and those lies will continue. Iran is already stalling on the 60 days that were supposed to limit further talks that were to end Iran’s nuclear program. It doesn’t end Iran’s production of ballistic missiles. The MOU only says that the Strait of Hormuz is open for as long as Iran wants it to be, and Israel, not Iran, is pressured to stop the war in Lebanon. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that, however long attacks on Israel are committed by Hezbollah, Israel will counterattack. As it should.)
In return for these false and partial promises, Iran gets sanctions relief and pretty much everything else it wants. It also gets the $300 billion in relief money, presumably from nations other than the United States. We have to expect the Iranians to rebuild their nuclear program as fast as they can.
In short, the MOU is a disaster.
Trump has also messed around with the nomination of Jay Clayton to be director of national intelligence. The DNI vote was going to go ahead quickly, but the president upended that with his desire to combine it with the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a key to the government’s ability to fight terrorism and espionage, which expired last week. Now both are delayed indefinitely.
Trump seems to be losing a lot of support because of the Iran agreement. Will that harm the Republicans in the midterm elections coming this fall? It sure could.
Jed Babbin is a Washington Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. Follow him on X @jedbabbin.
John Zogby: Grade F
There was no nuance this past week. For the president, it stunk like a landfill.
The 14-point MOU with Iran is a humiliating loss of face for the president and the U.S., which gains nothing except a vague promise that Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon and will reopen the Strait of Hormuz — both of which take things back to status quo antebellum.
In return, the U.S. will end sanctions, engineer a development fund of $300 billion through Qatar, and watch the mullahs stay in power.
Trump is getting excoriated by Right, Left, and center. The more hawkish MAGA wing feels he has sold out Israel, while the “America First” flank wonders why a man who promised no foreign interventions allowed himself to be bullied into a war by Netanyahu. Israel is the biggest loser because the main focus now will be on whether or not the MOU means Israel abandons its military operation in Lebanon.
The Israeli prime minister says he won’t put an end to it and declares victory. The ayatollah says that this is a sine qua non for signing the agreement.
So, at the very least, most of the deal is a nothingburger, except it allowed me to use some Latin in the report.
At his press conference during the G7 summit, Trump was rambling and incoherent in describing the deal before going on to lash out at world leaders and tee up his very own Sancho Panza — translated: Vance — for any failures in the deal.
Closer to home, news reports suggest that many in Venezuela and most in Greenland are angry with Trump because, in the former, they feel nothing has improved post-Maduro, and in the latter because it was all so stupid and gratuitous.
Even closer to home, as in home itself, the Ultimate Fighting Championship at the White House was embarrassing and tawdry, especially some of the horrible comments made by the fighters. The same president who created the Department of Government Efficiency allowed for spending $60 million of taxpayers’ money to turn the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial into a sick, algae-colored green — because it is now an algae-infested invasion.
And new Epstein files have been released this week with testimony, uncorroborated, that the former-just-Donald Trump may have been a nipple nibbler. This doesn’t help his cause.
His job performance average for the three polls this week is 39%. Note to readers: Your assignment is to read Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, a classic story of when things go wrong.
John Zogby is the founder of the Zogby Survey and senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His latest book is Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should. His podcast with son, managing partner, and pollster Jeremy Zogby, can be heard here. Follow him on X @ZogbyStrategies.
Vance tries to make sure nothing is lost in translation
You can always tell when the White House knows it has a problem, when its allies are turning against it, and it has an awkward proposition to sell: It sends out the vice president.
“All right. Good morning, everybody. Nothing to talk about,” a beaming JD Vance said as he hopped onto the podium of the briefing room with the hopeful demeanor of a punt returner looking at the ball rather than the ton of meat bearing down on him.
Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser, was no doubt too busy to discuss Iran. And Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, is far too sharp an operator to end her maternity leave while the administration is trying to pretend a memo signed at a Versailles dining table is going to rewrite the geopolitics of the Middle East.
And so it fell to the man promoting a book about Catholicism with an image of a Methodist church on the cover to do the honors.
Secrets was in the briefing room, and you can read our sketch here.
During the briefing, Vance confirmed he would be leading the next phase of negotiations, which had been slated to start Friday in Switzerland. But he hedged, saying he wasn’t sure when he would travel there.
Meanwhile, a pool of reporters due to make the trip with him was finally told on Thursday evening that they would not be flying that night.
Since then, Iran has said it doesn’t want the talks to be in Europe. So we are off to a fine start with the 60-day countdown already running for more than 24 hours.
Lunchtime reading
How Pulte’s new role is a win for CIA’s John Ratcliffe: The CIA director had clashed repeatedly with Tulsi Gabbard when she was the director of national intelligence. Bill Pulte, who takes up the post of acting director on Friday, is expected to slash jobs, leaving the floor to the CIA.
Behind Trump and Melania’s separate White House bedroom doors: Excerpts from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book are dropping. Secrets enjoyed this one about life in the presidential residence, particularly how the president is a fan of carpeted bathrooms. A reminder that his tastes are fixed firmly in the ’70s and ’80s.
You are reading Washington Secrets, a guide to power and politics in D.C. and beyond. It is written by Rob Crilly, who you can reach at [email protected] with your comments, story tips, and suggestions. If a friend sent you this and you’d like to sign up, click here.