Welcome to Friday’s edition of Washington Secrets, with your guide to who is up and who is down this week. Your usual scribe, Rob Crilly, is traversing the plains of Kansas today, so this is Chris Irvine pinch-hitting. If a friend sent you this and you’d like to sign up, CLICK HERE. As usual, we run the rule over the president’s week.
Is President Donald Trump’s ramped-up travel schedule a sign the White House is in damage limitation mode with a month to go until the midterm elections?
For weeks, Republicans have grumbled that Trump has been unhelpful on the campaign trail, but now the president has decided to take matters into his own hands and tell the American public they simply don’t understand how good a job he’s done.
“We’ve done a great job, and the thing I haven’t done a good job with is explaining it to people,” he told reporters Thursday on the South Lawn, before grumbling that the press isn’t covering his administration’s achievements.
“We have the best economic numbers of any president in the history of our country, and yet people don’t know about it because the press won’t talk about it.”
On Monday, Trump announced a $15 billion steel plant project in Iowa. The Hawkeye State (not the Hawk state, Sen. Eric Schmitt), which has voted for Trump three times, appears to be wobbling in its support for Republicans, as it’s been hit hard by rising fuel costs and beef imports, while struggling with one of the worst cancer rates in the country.
Similarly, Trump hit up a truck factory in Denton, Texas, on Thursday, before holding a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, Thursday night. Tonight, he will head to Mobile, Alabama, and on Saturday, he’ll be in Dayton, Ohio, as his team appears to be focusing on red states to boost turnout and avoid a looming Blue Wave.
In a sign of frustration with how the campaign has been going, Trump acknowledged that scheduling the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention on the same night as the NFL’s opening game was a “very stupid thing to do,” although he insisted in the interview with Time Magazine that the convention “had 107 million views” compared to the NFL’s 25 million (surely an apples to apples comparison?).
Related, Trump said he hadn’t heard Texas Republican Senate Candidate Ken Paxton’s criticism of the convention. Paxton, who is struggling to halt the momentum of Democrat James Talarico, was heard telling donors that “everybody’s numbers are down” after the Dallas convention in a leaked audio memo.
“I can tell you that the convention was amazing, as you probably know,” Trump said in response.
Elsewhere, Trump hosted the great and the good of the tech world at the White House on Tuesday, where he and CEOs signed a “morally binding” agreement to self-regulate artificial intelligence (although let’s quietly ignore the document said “Unites States”). In a rather extraordinary scene, he held an impromptu press conference with the likes of Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and more. Zuckerberg appeared to stifle a laugh as Trump railed against “fake news” CNN after the network interrupted Amodei during a typical warning about the risks of AI. No word on if the CEOs will adopt Trump’s “super intelligence” rebrand
On top of that, Trump launched America.gov, a new AI website designed to help the public interact with the federal government. Hailing it as “a restoration of America’s founding promise,” he claimed it would save hundreds of hours of laborious paperwork.
All in all, a busy week. And that’s not even to mention him dismissing U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue’s claims that the White House discussed selling weapons to Xi Jinping during last week’s state visit. He also had time to create confusion with the United Kingdom over a suspected terrorist plot outside a British air base, RAF Fairfield, a key base for U.S. heavy bombers. After British police released the suspects on bail, Trump expressed his displeasure at the decision.
And he also expressed his amazement at Benjamin Netanyahu’s story that an Israeli plumber was responsible for stabilizing a hijacked Flydubai flight.
“I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s the story that I got from Bibi,” Trump said. That’ll definitely help quell suspicion from some corners of the internet that there’s more than meets the eye to this story.
So what did our two strategists make of it all?
John Zogby: Grade D
Current polling shows Trump with his lowest approval rating on handling the economy 26%. The congressional generic ballot reveals double-digit leads for Democrats, with one as high as a 16-point lead, 56% to 40%.
The Democrats appear to be holding on to those who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, plus 10% of those who voted for Trump that year. But, to quote the late great Del Shannon, ‘I wa-wa-wa-wa-wonder…’ Lots can happen in one month.
Trump says he wants to be on the ballot, and he is. More and more GOP candidates are running away from him. And the hits keep coming.
Former Special Prosecutor Jack Smith confirmed in testimony, in what was supposed to a GOP-Senate triumph, that Trump had engaged in ‘serious crimes’ and had won grand jury indictments against him. The hearing backfired when, at a dramatic moment, a Missouri senator (whom I won’t name because I am sure he would prefer it that way) confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes, earning shock-and-awe looks from his own colleagues.
For his part, the president started running faux “Morning in America” ads with taxpayers’ money, receiving condemnation from all sides. And he did a lengthy interview with Time in which he declared victory multiple times in the war with Iran, left annihilation of Iran on the table, expressed regrets over his three Supreme Court choices, and said he might ban more press from the White House.
So, the Democrats appear to be in good shape today, including Senate candidates in deep red states like Mississippi, Kansas, Nebraska, and even Kentucky. But the election is not today, and the Democratic Party is not beloved. Stay away from the betting sites.
John Zogby (@ZogbyStrategies) 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.
Jed Babbin: Grade B+
It was a very good week for Trump and his team. The Iranians endorsed the Democrats(!), we pulled out of Iraq (for good?), and the Iranian rial was trading at 2.5 million per U.S. dollar.
It’s hard enough to believe, but the Iranians have endorsed the Democratic candidates over the president’s Republicans. Whisky tango foxtrot, over? The Dems seem unconcerned, neither bragging about it nor rejecting the Iranians’ endorsement. Iran’s 26-page letter of endorsement is unlikely to be read by all but a very few Americans.
Trump pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq for the present. We got out of what Trump called our “endless war” in Iraq at long last. We originally pulled out of Iraq, and then, under former President Barack Obama, we went back in in 2014 to fight ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. That mission is apparently over, and Mr. Trump is celebrating.
The Iranian economy is in the trash heap of history. The weak rial shows that their economy is on its last legs. Our blockade is succeeding, Iran’s efforts to close the Strait of Hormuz are failing — traffic is almost back to pre-war levels — and all Iran can do is stir things up in Lebanon and Yemen, which it is doing all too well. The fact that the attempt at hijacking a Flydubai airliner was foiled by Israeli passengers says a lot about Iran’s weakness.
Jed Babbin (@jedbabbin) is a Washington Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of President George H.W. Bush.
How Kansas became collateral damage in Canadian trade war
Rob has been in Kansas this week as alarm bells ring that this reliably red state could be having buyer’s remorse. Earlier Friday, Secrets wrote about how Trump’s slamming of Bombardier, urging a boycott of the Canadian company’s planes, threw the 1,500 people working at its American heaquarters in Wichita for a loop.
“It was all anyone could think about for days,” said one employee in the parking lot outside its Wichita hangars. “There isn’t a person in this city who isn’t connected to aviation in some way. How could he diss something so important?”
One senior Republican told Secrets that if you wanted to deliberately make it impossible for Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) to win reelection, this is how you would do it.
“Bombardier, importing beef … those two things in particular are just about the worst things you can do for a state where agriculture and aviation are huge industries,” they said.
READ MORE FROM ROB CRILLY about how the Trump administration is seemingly doing its utmost to hand Kansas to the Democrats during the midterms.
Lunchtime reading
Decades after Watergate, Justice Department reviews whether Nixon got a raw deal: It’s been a talking point among the young MAGA crowd, JD Vance has flagged it, and now it seems we are into “Watergate As Lawfare” territory.
The woman who wants to ‘make America hot again’: Sample line: “When pressed on what conservative policies she would like to see enacted, Ms. [Raquel] Debono is not clear — although she is keen to list the things that she is against. Among them: pro-lifers, rent freezes and anti-trans rhetoric.”