Welcome to Friday’s edition of Washington Secrets. If a friend sent you this and you’d like to sign up, CLICK HERE. What a week: 9/11 commemorations, more escalation in the Persian Gulf, trade war with Canada, and a first Republican midterm convention. Once again, we run the rule over how it all unfolded.
Donald Trump spent Labor Day weekend at his New Jersey golf club before returning to the White House on Monday. Meanwhile, his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, made their first visit to Kyiv to see if they could kick-start peace talks with Russia, a country they have visited repeatedly (and they were in Moscow before heading to Ukraine).
Tuesday brought a 25th-anniversary 9/11 commemoration at the Ellipse, where Trump met first responders and Gold Star families. He presented a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom to Welles Crowther, who became known as the “Man in the Red Bandana.” He also spoke by phone with Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin said Putin assured Trump that Russia had no aggressive intentions toward Europe. OK.
A day later, attention turned to Dallas for the Republican Party’s first midterm convention. The president was due to speak for 45 minutes. In the end, his speech lasted almost two hours, in a sign of how the GOP’s efforts to hold Congress fall on a single man.
The standout moment from the speech was when he proposed a $5,000 “Trump dividend” for every adult American if Republicans retain both chambers of Congress.
He returned on Thursday for a briefer appearance to close the convention, but the evening belonged to his vice president. JD Vance delivered a 39-minute speech that could have been a message to his newborn son, setting out a father’s hopes and fears for his future and weaving them into a political philosophy centered on the idea of “birthright.”
The speech included an appeal to voters not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” in the midterm elections, but it also felt like a soft launch of a presidential campaign. Secrets was impressed, and you can read our take here.
Trump was back in Washington on Thursday night and is due to fly to Ireland later on Friday to spend time at his golf club there.
So what did our two political strategists make of it all?
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Jed Babbin: D-
We have gone from JD Vance’s “It’s not a war” and Trump’s “it’s no big deal” to Trump’s offer to bribe Americans with a $5,000 check in one brief week. The tit-for-tat strikes going on in Iran are not going to resolve anything.
The president seems to want to rename things rather than deal with them. The latest target — after Lake Ontario, the Gulf of Mexico, and others — is the state of New Mexico to be called “New America.” Why bother? There are many other things the president should be dealing with, rather than this trivia, such as the war in Iran.
The definition of war is found in the 19th-century German philosopher Carl von Clausewitz’s book, On War. That definition says, “War is an act of force to compel an enemy to do our will.” We are trying to force Iran not to obtain nuclear weapons, and the Iranians want to keep conducting Islamist jihad, which we don’t want. That sure sounds like a war.
We have hit five Iranian tankers this week, and they, in turn, have fired at two of our Navy ships, eight oil tankers, and 10 other ships. Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao said this week that Iran “blew the hell” out of our base in Bahrain. That casual admission confessed more damage than had previously been admitted. The aforementioned “tit-for-tat” strikes are not accomplishing much. The war is now stalemated and can’t remain in that state for a variety of reasons, not all of which emanate from our politics.
Trump’s offer of a bribe to vote Republican in November comes with a sad history. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent $580 to each veteran of World War I in 1936, George McGovern promised $1,000 to each family in 1972, and Joe Biden sent trillions of dollars out to families during COVID-19. None helped save their parties from electoral defeat. Neither will Trump’s promise, which will prove empty if the Republicans lose in November.
Jed Babbin (@jedbabbin) is a Washington Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of President George H.W. Bush.
John Zogby: F
As we remember the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001, we also need to recall how we, the people, came together at that moment. Today, 25 years later, we are no longer just coming apart. We are apart, and we are led by someone who is purposely exploiting our pain for personal gain.
The U.S. is in a manufactured trade war with our neighbor, Canada. Trump holds a GOP rally in Dallas with lots of empty seats on behalf of candidates who are running in competitive districts and states, and several refuse to show up. They and others don’t want him to campaign for them in their districts.
He announces that he wants his base voters to feel like he is on the ballot this November, and that is a real problem for his part. A new Financial Times poll has his job approval at 33%, down 3 points from July.
He calls for more data centers, though 69% of voters don’t want them anywhere near where they live — 45% “strongly disapprove.”
The U.S. is engaged in a full-on war with Iran, which 60% of the public does not support. Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz plunges, even though the president says it is open. Iran announces that it has captured a U.S. submarine drone and promises a new wave of attacks against the U.S. Navy. The United States increases its strikes near Kharg Island.
This week, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis set several Saudi refineries ablaze. Oil hit $100 a barrel on Wednesday and is at $102 Friday, with experts suggesting it will hit $120 soon. Gas at the pump was at a record $4 per gallon on Labor Day, and the average as I am writing this is $4.22. (I paid $4.24 on Tuesday.)
The U.S. Supreme Court dealt the president a huge blow by ruling that Missouri could not use its GOP-friendly redistricting lines for this November.
In an effort to rally his MAGA base, he promises a $5,000 check for every American adult if the Republicans keep control of Congress, which comes to a bill of $1.3 trillion. Where is that money supposed to come from? Who is supposed to ensure that the money is only used in the U.S.? Will your refrigerator and thermostat now spy and report on you?
Trust in government is at an all-time low, so my humble advice is to ask for the check up front. This is all of questionable legality, aside from being just ridiculous.
Meanwhile, the President has renamed New Mexico “New America,” to go with the Gulf of America and Lake America. This is all so very sad.
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.
Quote of the day
Before Secrets left Dallas at the end of the convention, we chatted with a Trump supporter in the hotel elevator. He was effusive in his praise for the president after his speech. In particular, he singled out the humor, describing how everyone in his section had tears rolling down their cheeks by the end.
But he took issue with the idea of a $5,000 Trump dividend.
“I’m a Trump supporter, and I don’t know about that. It seems awfully inflationary to me,” he told me.
Interestingly, the standout moment of Trump’s Wednesday night speech marathon merited barely a mention on Thursday, when a string of heavy hitters and Donald Trump Jr. took the stage. Is it already being shelved?
Lunchtime reading
The seeds of the next 9/11 are being sown in West Africa: The Sahel belt south of the Sahara has become a center of terrorism, with Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger accounting for more than half of global terrorism-related deaths, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
In the Realm of the Last Man Review: Francis Fukuyama wants you to know that he did not declare the end of history in 1992. His new book is a memoir, or a series of “meditations of a misunderstood man.”