Welcome to Friday’s edition of Washington Secrets. If a friend sent you this and you’d like to sign up, CLICK HERE. As usual, we run the rule over Donald Trump’s week, and we celebrate the New York Times reaching 175 years of age with an “editor’s note” for the ages, plus we ask whether AOC would even want Hasan Piker to campaign for her.
Donald Trump spent the weekend at his Doonbeg golf course in Ireland. “I thought it would be an easy trip,” said one person who traveled with him. “But he insisted on making news.”
Top among the news was his call for a united Ireland, joining the British north and the southern Republic, something that will cause conniptions in London.
Back at the White House, Trump waded into the growing disquiet about artificial intelligence on Monday and whether there should be “guardrails” to prevent a bot-fueled apocalypse. He said on Truth Social that the only control needed was “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
On Tuesday, he spent the day attacking institutions that he helped shape. He attacked the Supreme Court after it blocked his administration’s new restrictions on mail-in ballots, despite nominating three of its justices. And he posted video of the Kennedy Center, showing corrosion and general deterioration, after a judge blocked the latest attempt to add his name to the building.
A day later, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate by 0.25 percentage points, the first increase since 2023, defying Trump’s public calls for lower rates. Yet he later defended his Fed chairman pick, Kevin Warsh, who voted with other policymakers to address elevated inflation. He said Warsh was a “good man” who couldn’t do much if the rest of the board was intent on making the president look bad.
He traveled to Gastonia, North Carolina, in the evening to campaign for struggling Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley, who is running to replace retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).
On Thursday evening, Trump hosted more than 100 hunters, anglers, and members of the outdoor industry at a Rose Garden dinner. He signed executive orders to expand hunting and fishing access on public lands and waterways and to roll back Biden-era restrictions requiring nonlead ammunition at federal wildlife refuges.
Trump is due to spend the weekend at Camp David. Before that, his public schedule says he will make a healthcare announcement in the afternoon before traveling to his Virginia golf club for a MAGA Inc. meeting.
So what did our two strategists make of it all?
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John Zogby: F
The Supreme Court, by a 7-2 margin, refused to allow Trump’s plan to give the Postal Service the unprecedented power to withhold millions of mail-in ballots to prevent voter fraud. Even some GOP election officials cautioned that the proposal could lead to chaos and mass disenfranchisement.
The bond market has reached a yield of over 5%, the highest since 2007, which could drive up mortgage and consumer debt, as well as the burdensome interest paid for the national debt. Homebuyers can expect to start with a mortgage rate of 7%.
More and more buzz about an imminent burst of the stock market bubble.
The Fed defied pressure from the White House and agreed to raise interest rates a quarter of a percentage point to slow the rise of inflation. The Congressional Budget Office reported this week that one-third of inflation is linked to the war in Iran and will continue to rise through the first quarter of 2027.
U.S. ally Saudi Arabia is being attacked from all sides by Iranian-backed Yemeni Houthis and is facing a severe economic crisis because of blocked shipping routes.
The president refuses to help his “good friend” Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto leader of the kingdom.
As of this week, the Houthis control much of the Red Sea to the south. The Houthis are also attacking from Iraq to the north and have severely damaged a vital pipeline that runs east-west.
U.S. military bases are suffering loss of building and supplies.
Late this week, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), a three-term Republican who endorsed Trump in 2024, charged that the president has betrayed Hispanics with his harsh immigration policies.
There’s more, but I think I’ll stop here.
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: D+
This week had a lot of ups and downs for Trump, beginning with the poverty rate and ending with big losses in the Supreme Court and Congress.
We finally admitted that we have weapons in orbit, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, says we need to fight on and around the moon. I have been writing for decades that we need orbital weapons to protect our satellites, and now perhaps we have them.
There’s a lot of news from the war with Iran, most of it bad. The Iranian-backed Houthis have seized key islands in the Bab el Mandeb Strait. Saudi Arabia has attacked the Houthis, but they are highly resistant and looking for more ways to hurt Saudi oil exports. The Iranians have caused a lot of damage to our bases in Bahrain and Jordan with their missiles, but the president still brags that we have sunk a lot of Iranian Navy ships.
Trump says he will announce a new decision on Iran in the next few days. He can’t get out of the war, but he can shift strategies. And the inspector general of the Pentagon says that the war has cost, so far, about $33 billion. That may include the value of aircraft and other systems lost, which will take months or years to rebuild. But it probably doesn’t account for the fact that we’re running low on defensive missiles.
The big loss in the Supreme Court was on the subject of regulating mail-in ballots. The justices said the president can’t do it, so he’s left with picking up the pieces of his policy. He can’t get Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require IDs at the polls, so there seems to be every opportunity for Democrats to have illegal immigrants vote and have mail-in ballots galore. Not a good thing for voting security.
Another big loss was in the House passage of a war powers resolution. If the Senate passes another one, Trump may be forced to end the war with Iran suddenly. If the Republicans lose the Senate and the House in the midterm elections, that will almost certainly happen, as will another impeachment of Trump.
The House adjourned early to avoid passing an impeachment resolution on War Secretary Pete Hegseth. That will happen as well, along with other Trump cabinet impeachments, 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.
Correction of the day
The New York Times is 175 years old. And alongside all the pompous, first-draft-of-history style self-congratulatory navel-gazing is the following (on page 2):
“Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about the backlash within Israel to the documentary ‘NAZA’ included a statement that was intended to convey Israelis’ perception of the government’s military response to the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks in relation to the attacks, but inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception. It was removed from the article online.
And the offending paragraph?
“Israelis are deeply divided over how to apportion blame for the policy, military, and intelligence failures that preceded the attack and the war. But Israelis largely view themselves as the victims of the Oct. 7.”
I bet they do.
Mao Zedong was a great leader except for that one thing
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is many things. A socialist? Definitely. Bonkers? Possibly. Stupid? Absolutely not.
So Secrets wonders quite what she makes of Hasan Piker’s offer to campaign for her if she runs for president in 2028. The controversial left-wing streamer, who famously said America deserved 9/11, has already seen some Democrats steer clear of his “help” despite having millions of energetic followers.
And this interview with Axios rather covers why that is. When he was asked about past praise for Mao Zedong, he explained: “He’s a great man of history. Of course, there were a lot of excesses.”
Those excesses being? “Deaths borne out of mismanagement and famine,” he admitted when pressed.
Historians broadly estimate that the Great Leap Forward, general oppression and executions, and the Cultural Revolution were responsible for at least 40 million deaths. A lot of excesses indeed.
Lunchtime reading
Trump’s unapologetic emissary: Two offices, a screen displaying Truth Social, and a reputation for getting things done without grandstanding. Revealing profile of Marco “two jobs” Rubio.
The super donor quarterbacking Michigan sports – Larry Ellison’s wife: University of Michigan graduate Jolin Ellison is not a typical sports donor. But she has deep pockets and a powerful voice directed at winning football and basketball games.