Welcome to Friday’s edition of Washington Secrets, where we’ll be taking stock of Donald Trump’s week, its ups and its down with our two commentators, and we’ll be picking out one of the key moments from his Board of Peace speech …
The holiday meant it was a shortened week for the president, who returned from Mar-a-Lago on Monday evening. Tuesday and Wednesday were both quiet days by the frenetic standards of the Trump White House.
But Thursday was packed with parts from two of the biggest pieces of his presidency. In the morning, he gathered his new Board of Peace to hear plans for rebuilding and stabilizing war-torn Gaza. Although some key allies steered clear, there was no doubting the concrete progress made with promises of billions of dollars from Gulf states.
And he used the occasion to warn Iran that it was running out of time to strike a deal.
In the afternoon, he flew to Georgia, where he visited a restaurant, toured a steel company, and delivered a speech designed to tout economic progress.
He even found time to order the release of government files on UFOs and extraterrestrials, after Barack Obama, his predecessor as president, said in a podcast that he believed aliens were real.
“I don’t know if they’re real or not,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, but he added that he might be helping out his old foe: “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.”
So what do our two commentators make of it?
Jed Babbin: B plus
This was a week of waiting for Trump to make up his mind on how and whether we will attack Iran. There was big news from the Environmental Protection Agency on emissions from cars, and the sale of arms to Taiwan is also on hold for now.
Are we going to attack Iran? Or are we going to continue appeasing it through negotiations? That’s the biggest question of the week. If we attack, are we going “all in” or just hit parts of their government and infrastructure? As I’ve written before, if we go, we shouldn’t restrain our forces because Iran will try to, and probably succeed in, starting a larger regional war. This won’t be as easy as the Maduro raid. It’ll be a long, tough campaign with a lot of U.S. casualties. Trump should think long and hard about the dangers. China, for one, can’t keep going without Iranian oil. But will they fight for it?
In 2009, under the Obama administration, the EPA determined that carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and three other greenhouse gases “endanger the public health and welfare of current and future generations” under the Clean Air Act. The EPA has just overturned that finding because, among other things, it was based on junk science. It does away with a lot of things about car emissions, including voiding many of the emissions standards. Among other things, the EPA action, which will surely be taken to court by the enviro-wackos, does away with the requirement that new cars turn their engines off at stoplights or stop signs. My car does it, and it’s incredibly annoying while saving not one speck of car emissions. The EPA action may cut the price of cars by about $2,500 and will definitely make cars more manageable and easier to run.
The “climate change” nonsense should stop now. One friend, who is in his late 50s and has lived in this area since he was 2, says he cannot recall a winter that was this cold for this long a period. Hell, even Antarctica has “grown” about a few billion tons of new ice in the last two years.
There’s a lot of buildup to Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is telling Democrats to behave themselves during the speech. They were, and should have been, embarrassed by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) tearing up Trump’s speech when he gave it a few years ago. It will be interesting to see if Trump says much of substance about his future plans. We won’t know ’til it happens.
John Zogby: D
GDP growth in the last quarter posted at 1.4%, well below the 2.5% that economists had expected. The U.S. trade deficit is now perhaps the worst since 1960 because of a 3.6% rise in the value of imports. Couple that with a decline in exports, and we have a “big, beautiful deficit.” We can thank the president’s tariffs for a lot of this, including a report this week that tariffs paid by midsized U.S. firms have tripled in the past year.
As I was writing this report card, news broke that the Supreme Court had struck down most of Trump’s tariffs as illegal, a huge blow to the president from an otherwise friendly court.
A new poll of Canadians shows that 42% of our neighbors to the north no longer feel that the U.S. is an ally; 48% now consider the U.S. a bigger threat than Russia; 57% say that the U.S. cannot be depended upon in a crisis; and 69% agree that the U.S. tends to create problems for other countries.
The president is positioning U.S. battleships and warplanes threatening a massive air strike against Iran, days after both the U.S. and Iran separately progress on a nuclear deal. The most recent polling on the matter reveals up to 70% of Americans oppose military action against Iran.
A terrible week again, but at least not as bad as the week experienced by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
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 is the founder of the Zogby Survey and senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His latest book, Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should, was just released. His podcast with son and managing partner and pollster Jeremy Zogby can be heard here. Follow him on X @ZogbyStrategies.
Trump’s ‘extraordinary’ duo
During his speech at the Board of Peace, Trump set out what makes his top team so effective, highlighting how JD Vance, his vice president, and Marco Rubio, his secretary of state and national security adviser, go about things in different styles but with the same end result.
Both were “extraordinary” statesmen, he said.
“JD has been great,” he said, before adding, “He gets a little bit tough on occasion. We’ve got to slow him down just a little bit on occasion.”
Then he turned his attention to Rubio, who returned recently from the Munich Security Conference, where his speech was notably gentler than Vance’s full-frontal assault of a year earlier.
“Then we have the opposite extreme. We have your friend sitting in the back,” said Trump. “Your good — your best friend sitting in the back is Marco. Marco does it with a velvet glove, but it’s a kill. The result is the same. They do it very differently.”
You don’t need Secrets to tell you that the comments will feed into 2028 speculation about whether the pair will end up on the same ticket.
Lunchtime reading
Vance flexes endorsement muscle and fundraising prowess ahead of midterm elections: The key quote is from GOP strategist Ford O’Connell. “The fundraising and endorsements go hand in hand, and for JD Vance, this is political currency. And when you build up a lot of IOUs, as Vance is currently doing, you know, people will be required to repay the favor, particularly, say, in 2028.”
How the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them: This is a great deep dive into how the U.S. and U.K. uncovered Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine, yet European intelligence services failed to believe the threat, and why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky kept dismissing the warnings.
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