Trump’s recent summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, ended not in toughness but in capitulation. Despite pledging red lines beforehand, Trump rolled out the red carpet, and has now appeared to endorse Moscow’s demands for the surrender of Ukrainian territory. In this week’s episode of the Washington Monthly politics roundtable, special guest Tamar Jacoby, Director of the New Ukraine Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, shares reaction on the ground in Kyiv to Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine. She also suggests steps Trump should be taking instead to regain the advantage over Putin.

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This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Paul Glastris: On Friday, President Trump had a shameful face-plant of a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska. He then invited Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House today, along with a team of European leaders—including the European commissioner, the head of NATO, and the presidents of France and Germany—who insisted on coming to back Zelensky and try to persuade Trump to take a tougher line than he certainly did in Anchorage.

That’s what we’re here to discuss. I want to start with you, Tamar. You are the guest of honor. In your story, you explained that in the run-up to the Anchorage summit things were relatively quiet, but in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine, that wasn’t the case last night. Tell us—are you safe, and what’s happening on the ground?

Tamar Jacoby: Yes, I’m safe. Kyiv is well protected by air defense. The scary air alerts do happen, but we haven’t had one in two weeks. Even when they come with great intensity, it’s every other or every third night. Life goes on in Kyiv—people are out in bars and restaurants. It’s a beautiful late summer.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, not so much. Last night was bad in some places, though not here. The week before the Alaska meeting was actually a good week, because Putin was trying to behave, and we all got a full night’s sleep for more than a week. It was noticeable—you realize how much stress people are under when suddenly there’s relief. Everyone was different, much more cheerful.

But you’re right: the most important thing is the shameful concessions Trump is making, pressuring Ukraine hard. It really is back to: give Putin whatever he wants.

Paul Glastris: So we went into this summit on Friday where the Europeans and Zelensky had discussions with Trump about what he would do. What were the red lines, and how were they reversed?

Tamar Jacoby: He agreed to some red lines, including that Ukraine would not have to give away territory Russia hasn’t conquered. Many Ukrainians are reluctantly coming around to the idea that they might have to forego the land Russia already holds. But we’re also talking about an area bigger than the West Bank that Russia has been trying—and failing—to conquer for 10 years.

We went into Alaska with Trump seeming to understand that it was important to get a ceasefire before detailed talks, and that security guarantees for Ukraine were critical. There were many things he seemed to get. But in Alaska, he didn’t seem to remember any of them. Instead, he rolled out the red carpet, stood there laughing with Putin, and even had an air salute overhead—for a man who’s been an international pariah, killing tens of thousands of people for four years.

Two big concessions stand out. First, Trump seems to have agreed with Putin that a ceasefire isn’t important—that Putin can go on killing until a full peace is reached, which only increases pressure on Ukraine. Second, and worse in my view, Trump now appears to be pressuring Ukraine to give up the remaining half of Donetsk—a region Russia has fought over for more than a decade without real success. That would mean giving it away for free, soil watered with the blood of countless Ukrainian fighters.

But the war isn’t really about territory. It’s about whether Ukraine can exist as an independent country, with the political system and alliances it chooses. Putin stood on stage in Anchorage, 15 feet from Trump, and repeated those demands. Trump nodded along. We’re talking about a return to Cold War-style divisions of Europe—except now Russia doesn’t even control that territory with troops, yet we may hand it to them.

Paul Glastris: Let me ask about one detail: a lot of reporters noted the meeting ended very early. There was supposed to be a longer press conference or even a second round of discussions. Instead, it wrapped up abruptly, and Trump’s aides looked ashen-faced—hardly pleased with what they’d heard. What have you heard about that? What do you make of it?

Tamar Jacoby: I don’t have inside knowledge, so I can only speculate. My guess is that Trump initially thought he’d suffered a blow. He went in wanting a ceasefire and came out without one. At first, I think he took that as a failure. But over the weekend, he seems to have decided he could spin it as a win if he simply gave in to Putin.

That’s the point: Trump talks tough but, when rebuffed, capitulates. And at root, he’s always admired Russia as a “great world power.” For forty years, he’s wanted to be Putin’s equal, to do business with Russia. That motive has never gone away.

The press conference was revealing. It was short—twelve minutes—and light on details. But the end was all about business deals, both men talking about opportunities to work together commercially.

Paul Glastris: Before we turn to today’s developments, I want to linger on the fallout here in Washington. Bill, you track this closely. As you watched coverage after Friday, what struck you?

Bill Scher: What struck me is how sterile the coverage has been. Commentators have treated it neutrally, but this is seismic. Trump is trying to turn back the clock to a pre–World War I world, when a handful of leaders drew maps at whim. We fought two world wars to get away from that.

Woodrow Wilson, whatever his flaws, fought for self-determination and the League of Nations. FDR and Truman carried that vision forward, and after World War II the idea took hold: borders couldn’t just be changed by force.

Now it’s the European leaders who want to uphold that order, while Trump is pulling the U.S. in the opposite direction. It’s shocking—he is 180 degrees away from the U.S. position of the last century.

Paul Glastris: I was texting with a national security friend and asked: if you put 100 GOP-aligned military leaders in a room and promised anonymity, how many would back Trump’s policies toward Russia? He said zero. And half would want Trump jailed.

This can’t be what many Republican officials actually believe in. Bill, Matt—have you seen any pushback from elected Republicans or senior party figures?

Matthew Cooper: Some. In recent weeks, when Trump briefly struck a tougher tone on Putin, Republicans showed a little more backbone. The Senate even passed a sanctions resolution with 85 votes. That suggests their innate hawkishness hasn’t vanished.

But it’s inconsistent. For example, Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan has been vocal about Russian and Chinese patrols near Alaska, but overall Republicans seem reactive—they only show toughness when Trump does. They’re not going to push him. And the Europeans know that, which is why they’re pressing him directly today.

The question is whether Trump is a “pillow”—malleable, shaped by the last person in the room—or whether he’s truly in Putin’s camp. Hard to say. Maybe today he’ll swing back toward Kyiv, maybe not.

For context, think back to 1986. Reagan and Gorbachev failed to reach a nuclear deal at Reykjavik, and hawks were relieved. Contrast that with last weekend: many were relieved there was no deal, believing Trump might have held his ground. That relief evaporated when he pivoted over the weekend.

Tamar Jacoby: I agree with Matt—we should see what happens today. But Bill captured the risk best: we could be sliding back to pre–World War I map-drawing, ignoring peoples’ rights.

My impression is that Trump doesn’t even understand that dimension. At the press conference, Putin laid out his vision, and Trump looked like he barely grasped it. Instead, he’s focused narrowly on land-for-security guarantees—whether Ukraine gives up Donetsk in exchange for promises.

That may be all he sees. After all, this is the man who once said, “If I want Greenland, I should have it.” He doesn’t see anything wrong with the very idea that horrifies us. And because he sets the terms of debate, today’s White House meeting will likely focus on the land swap and guarantees—while the bigger issue of Ukraine’s sovereignty, the “root causes” as Putin calls them, may not even be discussed. That’s frightening.

Paul Glastris: I’ve watched Trump’s statements over the last few months. He said he was “very upset with Vladimir Putin,” even used the word “bullshit,” and hinted at tougher sanctions and weapons for Ukraine. Some people thought maybe he’d really changed. Others said he was just lying.

Anchorage proved the cynics right. He told people what they wanted to hear, then sold Ukraine out.

Tamar, especially—you’ve written about what actually needs to be done. Tell us: what are the Europeans trying to get Trump to do, and what do you think really needs to happen?

Tamar Jacoby: We’ll see what the Europeans can do. The challenge is to reframe the conversation without provoking Trump. You can’t just tell him he’s wrong. You have to play to him. The question is whether they’ll be strong enough to hold their ground.

What should happen is clear. There’s an “easy peace” and a “hard peace.” The easy peace is giving Putin what he wants. That’s what Trump is proposing. It would end the war in weeks and win him the Nobel Peace Prize.

The hard peace is forcing Putin to negotiate in good faith by raising the costs of war. That means real military pressure, real economic pressure, and sustained U.S. and European commitment. So far, we’ve helped Ukraine but wavered on the endgame. Every time Trump flips, Putin concludes we’re unserious. He needs to know pressure will continue until he changes behavior.

Right now, he has no reason to believe that. A German think tank recently calculated what the war costs Western countries: less than 0.2 percent of GDP. That’s peanuts. Germany spends more on bus subsidies. It looks like a pet project, not an existential fight. For America, maybe it is—but for Europe, it absolutely is existential.

Matthew Cooper: It’s worth making explicit: even if Ukraine gave up Donetsk, the war wouldn’t end. Putin’s ambitions won’t stop there.

Tamar Jacoby: Exactly. Donetsk is the high ground, the fortified strategic area from which Russia could launch further attacks. If Putin gets it, he’ll be positioned to take more in a few years.

Right now, some in Washington are talking about trading Donetsk for “serious” U.S. security guarantees. But Russia has already signed guarantees with Ukraine and Europe—and thrown them away. And Trump hasn’t delivered a single bullet to Ukraine beyond what Biden already had in the pipeline. Why would anyone trust his word?

Paul Glastris: It feels like once the debate turns to “security guarantees,” we’ve already lost. We’re down to dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on a meaningless piece of paper—peace in our time.

Bill Scher: If I were Ukraine, I’d hold out until the Trump presidency ends. His word is worth nothing. Remember the Iran nuclear deal: Obama struck it, Iran complied, and Trump tore it up anyway. Why trust him now?

If Ukraine can hold out for three years, maybe the American people will throw Trump out and you’ll get a partner you can trust, at least for a while. That’s still risky—but better than cutting a deal with someone who can’t be trusted at all.

Tamar Jacoby: A lot of Ukrainian soldiers feel the same. They’re determined to keep fighting, even if it means revolting against Zelensky should he try to compromise. But they will need U.S. intelligence, and they will need Europe to keep buying American weaponry. If Trump cuts that off, it’ll be very hard to last three years.

Matthew Cooper: Don’t forget Trump’s grudges. The first impeachment was about Ukraine. He still resents that, and he holds grudges forever. That, more than anything, colors his policy.

Paul Glastris: But let me push on that. Is it possible Trump feels humiliated now—like he lost? He’s about to be surrounded by European leaders who will flatter him, tell him he’s the great peacemaker, the one who deserves the Nobel Prize. Could that change his behavior?

Matthew Cooper: Sure. His ego is fragile. The Europeans won’t tell him he lost; they’ll tell him he’s already winning. They’ll remind him Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel for brokering peace. They’ll feed him praise, call him strong, call him decisive. With Trump, it’s child psychology.

Tamar Jacoby: They’ll even call him “daddy.”

Paul Glastris: [Laughs] And he’ll like it. Tamar, what’s the best realistic scenario coming out of today’s meeting?

Tamar Jacoby: That Trump realizes Putin is demanding far more than he’s taken so far, and that he starts listening to the Europeans instead of swinging back and forth.

The bare minimum would be returning to the status quo from a month ago: the U.S. sells weapons to Europe to give to Ukraine, continues intelligence support, and imposes real economic costs on Russia. That means cutting off oil revenues—40 percent of Russian exports, a third of its budget—and blocking the flow of Western technology that keeps missiles flying.

It’s not rocket science. It’s military force, economic isolation, and resolve. Without that, Putin won’t stop.

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The post Trump Just Gave Putin Everything He Wanted appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Trump administration has become increasingly creative—and ruthless—in its use and abuse of existing policy tools to further its agenda. It has, for instance, weaponized the Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights to reverse its historic mission. Instead of promoting diversity, it’s now working to end it. More recently, Trump has threatened to use legislation passed in 1980—the Bayh-Dole Act—to take over Harvard’s patents. While intended to give government the ability to compel the licensing of patents in fairly narrow circumstances—such as to protect health and safety—the law, in Trump’s hands, has become yet another cudgel to use against Harvard (and, potentially, other elite universities). 

In this week’s politics roundtable, editors Paul Glastris, Bill Scher and Anne Kim talk about Trump’s creeping authoritarianism, as well as the false promise of revenues from Trump’s tariffs. They also discuss how Democrats should respond to the escalating arms race over redistricting. 

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This transcript has been edited for length and clarity:

Anne Kim:

Let’s talk first about Trump’s tariffs, which have finally gone into effect. On average, we’re talking about 15 percent baseline tariffs on most goods coming to United States now, plus higher tariffs against certain countries that Trump is targeting for a variety of reasons. That includes a 50 percent potential tariff on Brazil for its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was accused of staging a coup after losing an election, and a threatened 50 percent tariff against India for buying Russian oil. Bill, you wrote a recent column for the Washington Monthly that disputes the president’s conclusion here. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Bill Scher:

Trump talks as if the federal government collects more revenue in tariffs that we’re a wealthy country. That’s not how most people really look at wealth. It doesn’t mean that you and I get more money if the federal government collects more money in revenue.

And it does seem like we are collecting more revenue from tariffs than before. If the July 2025 tariff number of $29.6 billion reflects what we will be paying going forward, the annual cost will be $355.2 billion. So that’s a lot more money into the federal government coffers. 

But remember, we’re paying that. 

Businesses have been trying to absorb the cost but now they’re saying they can’t keep doing this. 

Anne Kim:

It does seem like every day there’s a new story about how small businesses in particular are getting hit by this. And it seems that even large companies like Walmart and Amazon are beginning to announcethat they’re going to be doing price increases. And let’s not forget that these are incredibly regressive taxes. 

Bill Scher:

Well, not only are the tariffs regressive, if you’re middle class or working class, you pay a larger share of your wealth in goods than someone who’s a mega-millionaire. And this has been known about tariffs going back to the 19th century. This is why we got rid of these tariffs because people understood it was a very regressive system. 

Trump also just passed a tax cut—the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—but the tax breaks in that law are also skewed to the wealthy. In fact, there are analyses that say if you’re in the bottom 40%, you’re actually going to pay more or lose more of your income. So it’s regressiveness on top of regressiveness. And I think it’s a huge opportunity for Democrats going into 2026 and 2028 to say, “We’ve got a great way to relieve you on taxes—we’re to make those tariffs go ‘poof.’” Instant tax cut for the working class. And if we need that revenue so badly to alleviate our debt burdens, well, we can replace that with tax increases on the wealthy who got a sweet deal from the Trump administration.

Anne Kim:

Republicans are starting to propose tariff “rebates” as a way of, well, acknowledging that tariffs are going to take a bite out of people’s budgets. It hearkens back to maybe 10 years ago when we were all talking about carbon taxes and consumption taxes, and proposing rebates as way to make these taxes less regressive.

Paul Glastris:

Yeah, it’s sort of how you put the lipstick on the pig of an unpopular policy.

Well, the other thing that’s going on here is that the public is beginning to see price increases. The BIG newsletter has a piece out today about the freak out that’s happening on TikTok as people perceive that back-to-school prices this year are way higher. 

And on top of that, the big retailers are using this moment to bring in what’s called “dynamic pricing.” First of all, you look at these TikToks and people are saying, “Look, they’ve scratched out the old price or they’ve whited out the old price,” and the new price is now 30 percent higher on everything from swim trunks to home decor to groceries. But what they’re also doing is taking off the prices. Now you go into Walmart and other retailers and use your phone to scan a code to get the price, and that price can change by the hour or by the day. 

People hate it because they can’t plan their budgets if they don’t know going into the store what the price is going to be. And the larger context here is that it’s true that a lot of companies have held off increasing prices until now. But what’s also happening is that companies are using this as an excuse to bring in this dynamic pricing to be able to essentially extract more profit. They can know by your phone what your income is and charge you more for diapers and then the next person, right? Or they can see that there is a diaper shortage coming in two weeks and jack up prices. This is a pricing power that big retailers have wanted to use, and they’re going to use it now whether they need to be passing on prices from tariffs or not.

Anne Kim:

It’s like airline pricing coming to your school notebooks and backpacks!

So let’s turn to redistricting. Texas has been trying to redraw its map in order to gain five Republican seats. Democratic lawmakers have fled the state in order to break the quorum and prevent this plan from succeeding. Abbott has issued civil arrest warrants. Meanwhile, blue state governors in California and New York, for instance, are talking about hatching their own redistricting plans and there are even some strategists who think that Democrats should go further. 

For example, I was kind of struck by this op-ed in the Washington Post over the weekend arguing that Democrats should “go nuclear” by  retaliating against Texas based companies. For instance, they say, “blue states could band together to divest pension fund investments from and bar state contracts with Texas companies.”

What do you guys think about that particular escalation of tactics? 

Bill Scher:

Well, I think Democrats doing the right thing so far. Texas Democrats have no obligation to be handmaidens for what Republicans are trying to do. But having said that, I suspect the Republican gerrymander is going to backfire on them. It’s very heavily reliant on gains in Latino majority districts, which has not been a reliable group for Republicans, and those gains could easily recede in a in a wave election

That’s why this op-ed that you shared struck me as very excessive, because they’re talking about things like having other states punish Texas economically. But there’s not a lot of explanation about they could actually execute that and escape being slapped down by courts. So it would probably involve a lot of years of litigation and for what? 

Texas is trying to squeeze out five more seats. They may not even successfully do it on Election Day. The average pickup for the opposition party is 25 seats, and Democrats need three to win back the House. And if other states fight fire with fire with their own gerrymandering, I’m totally fine with that because I generally feel that gerrymandering ends up being largely a wash at the end of the day. So I don’t see the need to try to push the envelope to economic warfare, which could really backfire politically and may not even be necessary.

Anne Kim:

It seems reflective of some broader frustration among rank-and-file Democrats that the party “just isn’t doing enough.” The Democrats are always playing by the rules, playing nice, etc. etc. 

Bill Scher:

Those who are prone to complain that Democrats aren’t fighting hard enough come up with wilder and wilder ideas to prove that they mean business, and it’s always a balancing act between fighting hard and fighting smart. But economic warfare is going to really rub a lot of people the wrong way. 

Paul Glastris:

To be fair to the authors, what they’re saying is you threaten this in the same way that during the Cold War, each side threatened the other with destruction of their cities, not because you want to destroy their cities, but because you want to strike enough terror that neither side uses the weapon. 

What they’re arguing is that blue states have far bigger economic footprints than red states, so if they band together and threaten economic warfare, that might be enough for Republicans to sort of think twice about turning their side “up to 11.”

But look, Democrats have used pension funds for many years to advance political interests. In some sense, this isn’t that new. 

But what I would say is the Trump administration is being aggressively creative with policy in a way I don’t think very many people foresaw. We see every day some new use of federal power that may or may not be constitutional, but there’s no one there to tell them not to do it. And Democrats have to be thinking, if not now – because their power is limited to states and backbench press releases in Congress – what are the policies that they’re going to pursue that are creative and aggressive now that the administration has set a precedent and the Supreme Court has allowed a lot of this expansion of power.

It’s a setup for when Democrats come back to use those levers themselves, and I do think there’s a ripe opportunity here, if not in the moment,  to plan for the future about what the Democratic agenda will be.

Anne Kim:

Speaking of economic warfare and creative uses of policy, let’s turn to Trump’s escalation in the fight against higher ed. So there have been a couple developments here. The first is that the administration is now demanding that colleges hand over all admissions data, including on race, grades, and standardized test scores. Columbia and Brown have actually agreed to do this as part of their “settlements” with the government. 

Paul, you’ve been the arbiter of the College Guide for 20 years now for the Washington Monthly. What do think the long-term implications of this particular move are going to be for college accessibility all the things that the College Guide has stood for the last two decades?

Paul Glastris:

Well, the way I look at it is that the Trump administration is following everyone else in putting all its focus on elite universities, which educate 5 percent of students. A lot of this battle that the administration is waging against these hated elite institutions is trickling down to damage the universities and even the community colleges that educate 90 percent of college students. And most of these universities don’t have big DEI budgets. They didn’t have big protests during Gaza. They’re not rife with “woke” classrooms. They’re mostly people going to marketing classes taught by adjunct professors who have normal politics.

But there is a kind of a conspiracy in in the media and in politics to make everything about Columbia. So part of me is upset that this battle is going to again screw the average college student. 

Anne Kim:

One small consolation is that the New York Times reported that there’s literally no one actually available to collect all the race and admissions data anyway because of the 100 people who worked for the National Center on Education Statistics, only four of them are left. So it may end up being kind of a toothless thing, but it does set a bad precedent.

The second thing I wanted to ask about was the government’s threat to seize control of Harvard’s patents under the compulsory licensing regime outlined under the Bayh-Dole Act. And this is actually something that the Monthly has supported in the past in different contexts. So Paul, I would love for you to clarify the intent of the statute and how that’s an abuse in this particular context.

Paul Glastris:

Well, I’m not a patent lawyer. I’m not even a lawyer. But we have at the Monthly done considerable reporting by people who know the subject. And yes, the federal government has the ability to utilize this clear statutory power to force the use of patents in ways that advantage the American people. And we were arguing that they should do so to lower drug prices by taking the patents away from drug companies that misuse them and providing other means of producing these drugs in order to lower prices.

The Trump administration is not going after the drug companies, it’s going after the universities using the same statutory language. So it could well be legal with a pliant Supreme Court –  maybe it becomes constitutional – but it’s for a very different cause. 

But it does go to the point that there seems to be more aggressive use of policymaking on the Republican side than the Democratic side. When we started writing about this issue, arguing for march-in rights to bring down drug prices, it was when the Obama administration spent years debating it internally and not doing it. Then Biden comes in and they spent several years actually advancing the ball but left office without doing it. Donald Trump’s been in office six months and they’re already doing it. So that gives you a pretty good measure of the willingness of one party to push the envelope versus the other.

Anne Kim:

So to wrap things up, Donald Trump is making announcements as we speak about the pending militarization of DC. So what are you guys expecting from that? What are you expecting the response to be and what else are you watching for this week?

Bill Scher:

It’s another case of Donald Trump inventing an issue out of nothing. Crime is down in DC. There was a high profile incident involving someone he knew personally, and so he’s made that into a giant issue to give a justification for federal intrusion.

 And to Paul’s point, this is how the Trump administration operates. They’re on full tilt all the time to aggressively deploy and weaponize the power of federal government when it suits their political games. Otherwise, they’re hyper-libertarian. They’re denying disaster relief even not just in blue areas, but in red areas. They’re decimating the federal workforce. They’ve decimated the Medicaid program, which is going to affect a lot of people again, not just in blue areas, but in red areas. They want to take down the Department of Education.

 You can credit them for their diabolical creativity, but I think Democrats can be very well positioned to say these folks want to use the federal government to serve their own ends. And they don’t want to use it at all to help you.

Paul Glastris:

I agree that what may in the end bring down the Republican Party and Donald Trump is this aggressive policy overreach. But I wouldn’t take away from that the lesson that Democrats shouldn’t be aggressive because it’s going to take real aggressive policymaking to deliver to voters what they clearly want, which is affordability, lower prices, better incomes. 

All of that is going to take much stronger use of federal power than the Biden administration even used. So Democrats have to think very hard about how to do that, and how to deliver on the promises that they make when they next have a shot at voters.

Anne Kim :

Well, thanks very much, gentlemen. See you next week. 

The post Trump’s Increasingly Creative Authoritarianism appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On this episode of the Washington Monthly politics roundtable, editors Matt Cooper, Paul Glastris, and Bill Scher discuss the ongoing redistricting chaos in Texas, the implications of recent economic turmoil, and the shifting dynamics of GOP support for Israel amidst the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. 

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This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Matt Cooper:

Good morning. Well, we have a lot to cover. Let’s start with the crazy redistricting scene in Texas. Since the last day or so, Democratic lawmakers have fled Austin to avoid having a quorum so that Republicans can go ahead with their very unusual mid-decade redistricting, a response to President Trump insisting that they come up with more Republican seats. Democrats obviously oppose this somewhat radical move because redistricting is usually a once in a decade process right after the decennial census, but Republicans are trying to carve out more seats to prevent losing the House next year. Bill, you wrote about this last week. 

Bill Scher

Well, there was an analysis done by the Texas Tribune with Washington Monthly alum Gabby Birenbaum having the byline for that piece. And they’re trying to squeeze out five more Republican districts that would be majority Hispanic. Now, we know there’s been a big rightward shift amongst Hispanic Latinos in the 2024 election and really over the course of this Trump era. But when you’re redistricting, typically you’re trying, you’re not basing it on just the most recent election.

You’re not basing it on what swing voters did in recent elections. You’re trying to move in your known hardcore partisans  to ensure to get that flip. And we also know from the Texas Tribune, a different article, that a lot of Texas Republicans were getting pressured by Donald Trump to do this. And their response was that this seems kind of dicey. We’ve already kind of pushed this map to the limit and we could spread our voters out too thin, and get caught in a backlash in a bad year, which 2026 looks to be, but of course they did it anyway. 

And so we have other evidence in polling nationally that Hispanics are shifting back left. The Texas governor is underwater, which he hasn’t been for about three years. I mean, this is all kind of expected. Again, you have pendulum swings and Donald Trump is a very active president to be charitable. That’s the kind of situation that tends to cause backlash.

Matt Cooper:

Circumstances change. You got ICE roundups. Trump’s had popularity problems generally. Paul, let me ask you, I’m putting you on the spot a little bit, but Democrats are trying to run out the clock because they’re in a special session because of the flooding on the Guadalupe River that caused so many tragic deaths earlier this summer.

Democrats are hoping to run out the clock. The governor said he’s going to try to replace them. I don’t know what the laws are in Texas, if that’s even feasible. The impeached attorney general Ken Paxton has vowed to try to arrest the Democrats, but his authority doesn’t extend out of state and the Democratic leaders in Chicago this morning holding a press conference. I’m putting you on the spot here, but do you think the Democrats can prevail in stopping this thing?

Paul Glastris:

Well this is not the first time the Democrats of Texas has gone out of state to deny the Republicans a quorum. It’s worked before to delay votes. I’m not aware of any time that it’s worked to stop them altogether, because eventually miss your spouse, right? You can’t just live in a crappy hotel room in Cook County forever

Whether they can stop this vote, I have my doubts. Whether Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton can arrest these folks, I also have my doubts. But I think that the problem is, as Bill wisely pointed out in his story on Friday, that the Texas Republicans’ hearts are not in this. They know that it might not work.

They’re doing it because they’re bowing to Donald Trump, not because they’re all fired up. 

And in addition to the walkout of the Democrats, you have three Democratic state governors saying if Texas redistricts to add Republicans, we’re going to redistrict to take away Republicans. That’s Illinois, New York, and California. And that is not easy in any of those states to do, but it is possible. So there’s a mutually assured destruction going on here. And that’s what I suspect might in the end kind of lead to a peace agreement.

Matthew Cooper: 

Bill, let me ask you, because as Paul mentioned, these Democratic governors are saying, look, we may have to fight fire with fire. And over the weekend, Eric Holder, the former attorney general who has led a big campaign for more nonpartisan redistricting methods said, well, normally that’s what I favor, but this is an emergency. 

Do you think, especially in California where they’ve already gone to a commission system, do you think Democrats, assuming Texas goes ahead, they are going to be able to respond to this in kind?

Bill Scher:

I don’t know if they’ll be able to match Republicans one to one across the board, because there’s not much opportunity, there are legal obstacles. 

As you guys know, I’m a fairly bipartisan person, I’ve talked about bipartisanship in positive tones in the past. Not that bipartisanship is always awesome. But legislatively speaking, it’s often, it’s often necessary. And when you can do it, those, those policies tend to stick. But I’ve never been a bipartisan when comes to redistricting. I’m all for gerrymandering warfare. I think in the end of the day, it all ends up being a wash. 

They don’t really hold the fort when the waves come. So it’s not like you never can win an election ever again. When someone tries to gerrymander, we’ve been doing this for literally centuries. So it doesn’t bother me when everybody does it. It doesn’t make sense to unilaterally disarm.  So if Democrats try to fight fire with fire and if they can’t get Republicans totally even-steven in this cycle, perhaps they can mitigate. But you’re talking inches, you’re talking a handful of seats. And sometimes it comes down to that. So I understand why you would go to the wall with it. But in the average midterm, the president’s party loses 25 seats and Democrats only need three to take back the House. I mean, Democrats have to really blow it to not take back the House this time. And I don’t think the redistricting wars are going to be what saves Republicans.

Matthew Cooper:

Let’s move on a little bit. Now, we had this situation last week where there was a smattering of different economic news. But if you look closely, almost all of it was bad. We have an excellent piece in the Washington Monthly this morning by Robert Shapiro, who was the Under Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration, which explains why we had the disparity last week between a robust GDP number and a very, very weak jobs report. 

But in response to these weak reports, Trump acted with great maturity and wisdom and fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a part of the Labor Department, in a move that hasn’t been done since the Hoover administration and is widely deplored by economists on both sides of the aisle for breaking the thermometer because he didn’t like the temperature.

Do you see any fallout from this politically or are we just coming to accept that this is Trump?

Bill Scher:

Politically, I imagine this is too deep in the weeds for the average voter to pay attention to—that’s not the kind of thing really grabs you. I deeply worry about what it means economically if the entire business and financial community can’t trust the numbers that the federal government puts out.

How do we make any kind of planning and budgeting and investing decisions in that case? 

Paul Glastris:

It’s like firing your radiologist, right? Because he’s not giving you a reading of your cancer that you like. It’s crazy.

Bill Scher:

It’s totally crazy, which is why I think even pretty conservative Republicans didn’t take that step before because they would think two, three steps ahead. Donald Trump is not a two, three steps ahead kind of guy. He does what he wants to do in the moment and how this damages the credibility of the federal government or the Republican party is just not a concern of his.

I think politically this is probably low on the list of things dragging him down But in terms of things that are going to make the economy even more unstable which will have a political impact, this strike me as pretty big.

Paul Glastris:

I agree with Bill. I don’t think that the firing of the head of the BLS is a huge political deal. And by the way, I don’t think it’s going to even have that much effect because, as Bill said, these numbers are put together by teams of civil servants and the head of BLS does not have the ability to change the numbers. 

And if that somebody new comes in and tries to do it, there’s going to be scores, hundreds of people blowing the whistle on it. 

The big concern is the economy, right? We have a much weaker economy than we thought on Thursday. Or let me put it a little differently. There was great scratching of heads by a lot of people about how the economy seemed to be doing so well. And what we now know is the economy’s not doing that well. It’s actually losing steam. 

Matthew Cooper:

Speaking of political change, let me turn to the situation in the Middle East and the fallout from the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. We’re seeing a real collapse, according to the polls, in Democratic support for Israel generally and on this Gaza mess in particular with something like 7 % of Democrats approving of Israeli policy in Gaza.

This week three prominent podcasters—the Pod Save America fellows who were all Obama administration veterans all said we’ve got to cut off aid to Israel, and that would include defensive weapons like Iron Dome. On the Republican side, I don’t know if she’s a leading indicator or not, but the very outspoken representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia, a fierce Trump voice is saying that this is genocide.

Let me ask you about the domestic US politics of this. Is this a permanent shift? Or is it something that could evaporate if the situation in Gaza returns to something resembling normal? 

Bill Scher:

I wouldn’t call it permanent because the Israeli government can change. 

I’m no expert on Israeli political dynamics but if the next election would actually bring in a more moderate government, support for Israel in America could fall more or less along party lines. Of course, you point out, there’s faction of Republicans who are isolationists.

So it definitely makes things very scrambled politically. And I think most importantly has set back any hope of having a two-state solution, who knows how long. But that to me is where the North Star should still be. But it’s very hard to see how you get from point A to point B when you have an Israeli government that has literally zero interest in it. And you also have an Hamas leadership that has no interest in it.

Paul Glastris:

Well it’s not just  Democrats who are upset with the starvation in Gaza. It’s Donald Trump—he just seems very, very rattled by this.  And it’s curious because, know, a few weeks ago, he was sitting down with Benjamin Netanyahu agreeing with a policy of ethnically cleansing the Gazans. Well, starving the Gazans is how you ethnically cleanse them. So very, very confused policy coming out of the White House. So I really don’t know where domestically this all goes. Certainly there is more support for Netanyahu and the current Israeli policy among Republicans than Democrats, but things could change as Bill said in Israel very quickly too.

Matthew Cooper:

I should note news over the weekend that all the former, except for a few, but pretty much all the living former heads of Mossad and Shinbet, the Israeli intelligence services, wrote a letter to Netanyahu saying that this is a crazy policy, that he walked into Hamas’s trap, essentially, that Hamas wanted a humanitarian crisis. They’ve never had much regard for their own civilian population by putting their tunnels and missiles under mosques and hospitals and schools. And that he had walked into this and that this policy aimed at having every last Hamas militant  wiped out has created a diplomatic and military catastrophe for Israel. 

There are lot of pro-Israeli voices that are very uncomfortable with where Netanyahu has led this. And of course, there is a belief in Israel that Netanyahu, who faces legal peril there, is very eager to stay in office to avoid that legal peril. 

Well, gentlemen, thank you. Appreciate it. We will see you next week. Quiet August or not, bring your blue polo shirt and your beard and we’ll see you next time. Thanks.

The post Republicans Under Pressure: Redistricting, Economy, Israel appeared first on Washington Monthly.

After years of slavish fawning over Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump has apparently made an abrupt about-face in his views on the Russian President. In the last week, he has threatened huge tariffs on Russia’s trading partners if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire; he’s also restarted the flow of arms to Ukraine via third-party transactions with European allies. But will his resolve on Ukraine hold? 

Contributing writer Tamar Jacoby, Director of the New Ukraine Project for the Progressive Policy Institute, joined Editor in Chief Paul Glastris, Politics Editor Bill Scher, Exective Editor for Digital Matt Cooper and moderator Anne Kim for this week’s episode of the Washington Monthly Politics Roundtable.  They also discuss Jeffrey Epstein drama and the Rescissions battle in Congress.

Below is a three part transcript of their conversation, edited for clarity.

Trump’s Dramatic Shift on Ukraine

Anne Kim:
Good morning, everyone—and welcome, Tamar!

Let’s start with you. Trump seems to have made a complete 180 in his posture toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Just last week, he threatened to impose major tariffs on Russia’s trading partners unless Putin agreed to a ceasefire. He’s also restarted the flow of weapons to Ukraine through third-party deals with European allies. You recently wrote a great piece for the Monthly asking whether this about-face is permanent. How are Ukrainians feeling about all of this?

Tamar Jacoby:
Trump is single-minded—he came in thinking he’d be the one to make peace in Ukraine. And it’s finally dawned on him, six months in, that Putin is the obstacle to that. So he’s angry. And when Trump gets angry, he lashes out. He doesn’t count to ten, he doesn’t pause to assess—he acts out of irritation.

I don’t think his underlying admiration for Putin or Russia has changed. He still sees Russia as a great power that should be on friendly terms with America. He’s long been irritated with Ukraine. And I don’t think he fully understands how wily and aggressive Putin is. But right now, he’s frustrated—and so he’s threatening to punish Putin. Emphasis on “threatening”—nothing’s happened yet.

The key for Ukraine is that Trump’s allowing weapons to flow. Not through traditional foreign aid—he’s not giving them to Ukraine directly. Instead, the U.S. is selling arms to European allies, who are then passing them along. But for Ukrainians, that’s a distinction without a difference. They’re glad to have the weapons, and in some ways it’s more dependable coming from the Europeans. They feel a little more self-reliant—less at the mercy of Trump’s whims.

Anne Kim:
You mentioned earlier that Kyiv is more dangerous now than it’s been. Can you say more about that?

Tamar Jacoby:
It’s gotten much worse. Just a year ago, a typical night might mean 20 drones overhead. Now it’s 700. That’s a 35-fold increase. The point is to terrorize—and it is terrifying.

A year ago, an air alert might not mean anything for your neighborhood. You might hear a boom, then it was over. Now it feels like a war zone. In my first three years in Kyiv, I went to the basement shelter maybe four or five times. Now I go every time there’s an alert. And I’m not alone—people who used to shrug it off are now taking shelter, and talking about it the next morning. “How was it in your neighborhood?” “How’s your kid handling it?” It’s become part of daily life.

And yet, life goes on. Young professionals in my building are still getting married, buying apartments, having babies. Ukrainians haven’t given up. There’s always a sense that something—some new technology, some battlefield shift—is just around the corner. That resilience is still there.

Paul Glastris:
You’ve written that Ukrainians see the trickle of weapons from Trump as underwhelming. The initial shipments were just a handful of Patriot missiles—enough to last maybe an hour or two on a bad night?

Tamar Jacoby:
That’s right. And there’s no new U.S. money behind any of it. What’s changed is that Europeans are stepping up and paying. Patriots are these massive, truck-mounted missile systems. The missiles themselves—called interceptors—are like million-dollar bullets. A dozen of them doesn’t go very far. What Ukraine really needs are the full systems: the launchers, radars, all of it.

Germany’s giving two systems, Norway one. That will help. And then there’s new tech in development—Eric Schmidt, of Google fame, has a new system being built in Poland that might help shoot down drones. Patriots are great for ballistic missiles, but using them on cheap drones is a bad trade. Ukraine needs the next generation of drone defense.

Paul Glastris:
What about offensive weapons? Are we seeing Trump allow longer-range systems that could reach into Russia?

Tamar Jacoby:
In classic Trump fashion, he’s trying to have it both ways. He reportedly asked Zelensky whether these missiles could reach Moscow or St. Petersburg—but the next day the White House said he wasn’t authorizing anything, just asking. So for now, there’s no official permission to use U.S.-supplied weapons for deep strikes.

Ukraine is already doing some deep strikes with its own drones, but those only go so far. It’s hard to imagine either side achieving total military victory. More likely is a long slog that combines battlefield gains, economic pressure, and Western staying power until Putin decides it’s not worth it anymore. Will he ever? Hard to say. He’s talked about fighting the Swedes for 20 years back in the 1700s. This could go on a long time.

Paul Glastris:
In a previous show, we speculated that the best-case scenario might be Trump just losing interest and letting U.S. weapons flow passively. Is that still your view?

Tamar Jacoby:
There was real fear that Trump would impose a bad peace deal—something totally unfair to Ukraine. If he wants to neglect the peace process now, fine. That might help in the short term. But Ukraine still can’t win without U.S. intelligence and weapons. Benign neglect isn’t a strategy.

Matthew Cooper:
You embedded with the Ukrainian infantry recently. What did you learn?

Tamar Jacoby:
It was eye-opening. Infantry is the oldest profession—men fighting men, almost hand-to-hand. But now they’re stuck between two technological forces: drones from the enemy, and drones from their own side. It’s transforming warfare.

Trenches that used to be just a few hundred yards apart are now separated by 15 miles of “no man’s land,” because drones can see and strike anything that moves. You don’t even want to leave the trench to pee—drones will see you. Getting into the trenches is dangerous, and once you’re in, you stay. Soldiers used to rotate every day or two. Now they stay 30 days straight because the walk in and out is too dangerous.

So yes, there’s better tech on their side, but also much greater vulnerability. We’re in a transitional moment—between old-fashioned boots-on-the-ground warfare and a future where robots dominate the battlefield.

Anne Kim:
So where does Trump go from here? Will he stay frustrated with Putin, or flip again?

Tamar Jacoby:
If I could predict Trump, I’d be rich. But no, I don’t think he’s given up on the fantasy of two great men from two great countries making deals. But as a European diplomat once told me after Trump was elected: “Don’t worry. Putin will f*** it up.” And I’ve thought about that a lot. Whenever there’s movement toward peace, Putin resists. So if Trump really wants peace, Putin will frustrate him.

Paul Glastris:
Wasn’t this workaround—having Europe buy and transfer the weapons—Ukraine’s idea?

Tamar Jacoby:
Absolutely. Ukrainians understand Trump can’t be relied on. Europe has more skin in the game. If Putin wins in Ukraine, Europe is next—maybe not with tanks, but in some form. So it’s in their interest to keep the war contained to Ukraine. That’s what’s driving their support. Nobody in Kyiv is sentimental about U.S. aid turning into sales. Everyone understands. It was Zelensky’s idea.

Paul Glastris:
And we’re finally seeing Europe rearming?

Tamar Jacoby:
Yes, slowly. Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, Europe has been talking a good game. Now they’re putting real money into it. Whether they’ll be ready in time—big question. And Putin’s trying to divide them from each other and from the U.S. No one knows how that will play out.

But for now, it’s grim in Kyiv. Nobody expected peace this week. The war continues. The question is whether Ukrainians—and the West—have the stamina to keep up with the pace of technological change and military pressure.

Paul Glastris:
Is the war degrading Russia’s capacity?

Tamar Jacoby:
Unfortunately, not really. Putin has put the whole economy on a war footing. They’re making more drones, more missiles—it’s overheating their economy, but it’s not collapsing. Russia has operated like this before. It’s not new. Peter the Great sustained his economy through war, until eventually it drained everything else.

People I trust say that if the West really clamped down—cut oil revenues, blocked key components getting in through Turkey or Kazakhstan—it could make a difference. But that hasn’t happened yet.

Anne Kim:
Thank you, Tamar. Please stay safe. We hope to have you back again soon.

Tamar Jacoby:
Unless a missile gets in the way, I’ll be back. Thanks for having me.

Trump, Epstein, and the Rescissions Fight

Anne Kim:
Okay, let’s turn now to the controversy over Jeffrey Epstein, which is turning out to be almost as bizarre as the conspiracy theories themselves. There’s been longstanding MAGA obsession with Epstein’s client list. Now you’ve got Trump allies like Pam Bondi, Dan Bongino, and FBI Director Cash Patel—who came to power promising to expose the files—all saying, essentially, “nothing to see here.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal just ran a piece about a cryptic and racy birthday note from Trump to Epstein. So—maybe there is something to see here. What do you all make of it? Is this a real threat to Trump’s presidency?

Matthew Cooper:
I’d say not yet. Trump and Epstein had a falling out long ago, so I don’t think we’ll see documentation of Epstein “pimping” for Trump. Maybe something will come out, but who knows. Jonathan Alter has a good piece up this morning based on Michael Wolff’s hours of interviews with Epstein.

Alan Dershowitz made a point in the Journal: why would a criminal make a client list? And if such a list existed, it would’ve been destroyed long ago. That said, Trump is getting hoisted on his own petard. He built his power fanning conspiracy theories—and now he’s caught in one.

Still, I doubt it’ll dent his popularity or his ability to move legislation through a Republican Congress.

Anne Kim:
Bill, Paul—your take?

Bill Scher:
It may not block legislation, but it’s creating fissures at the MAGA grassroots and among conservative influencers. And that generates media churn.

Trump’s brand is rooted in conspiracy—being the guy who stands outside the establishment and claims to reveal the “real truth.” That’s a strong bond with his base. But now, when a conspiracy turns on him, he’s trying to wave it away. He posted something like, “We could give them grand jury stuff, but it’ll never be enough.”

It’s the same playbook as the birther saga—when he demanded Obama’s long-form birth certificate and even that wasn’t enough. He knows these theories can’t be resolved. Even if there’s no client list, there could be deposition transcripts naming people who were never charged. Under normal rules, you wouldn’t release that.

Trump’s impulse will be to redact or withhold—but that just fuels more suspicion. It’s a no-win cycle.

Paul Glastris:
Totally agree. What stands out is how weirdly Trump has behaved. He’s thrown out every trick in the book to distract from this. That suggests either:

1. the whole thing was a cynical power play—he and allies like Bondi rode the conspiracy to power, and now they’re exposed; or
2. there is something incriminating—maybe not a client list, but something he doesn’t want released.

The New York Times today reports that Trump’s solution is to redirect the outrage toward the press—attacking the Journal, attacking Rupert Murdoch. And MAGA hates Murdoch more than most liberals realize. They see Fox as part of the “fake news” machine when it criticizes Trump.

But I’m not sure the Times is right that this tactic will work. It might redirect the base’s anger—or it might not. Either way, this isn’t good for Trump.

Anne Kim:
Reuters had a poll last week: 69% of Americans think the government is hiding something about Epstein. And only 35% of Republicans approved of how Trump is handling the case. That was before the Wall Street Journal piece and his latest attacks on the media.

Paul Glastris:
And let’s be clear—it’s basically illegal to release grand jury depositions. So even if there is some juicy material, it’s probably going to be redacted or blocked by the courts. The MAGA base that wants full transparency is going to be disappointed.

As Josh Marshall pointed out, the real issue isn’t what’s in the depositions—it’s the physical evidence seized from Epstein’s homes during his second arrest. That’s what people want to see, and no one in Trump’s camp is even mentioning it.

Anne Kim:
So what should Democrats do? Ro Khanna teamed up with Tom Massie to demand release of the files. But now Trump is calling the whole thing a Democratic hoax. Should Democrats lean into this or back off?

Bill Scher:
I’m inclined to support what Ro Khanna’s doing—forcing a vote is fair game. But I’d be cautious about turning this into a full-on fire-with-fire campaign.

Democrats should be the party of governance, not conspiracy. Feeding deep cynicism about institutions might win a news cycle but it’s corrosive long-term. It empowers demagogues. Better to call out Trump’s hypocrisy: he fans conspiracies when convenient, then denies them when they threaten him.

That message—“You’re being exploited”—is more powerful than just stoking outrage.

Matthew Cooper:
There’s also a lesson from George W. Bush in 2000. After the Lewinsky scandal, even though Clinton had rebounded in popularity, Bush leaned into the “ick factor.” He talked about restoring honor and turning the page. I think there’s room for Democrats to do that now: tap into the public’s revulsion without turning into conspiracists themselves.

Paul Glastris:
Agreed. This is damaging to Trump because even his base isn’t fully buying his denials. Having someone like Khanna team up with Massie is smart. But Democrats shouldn’t overplay their hand. Let Trump destroy himself. The more this becomes a partisan talking point, the easier it is for him to reframe it as an attack from the left.

Anne Kim:
Let’s move to another major story: the rescissions package. Congress just passed a $9.4 billion rollback of previously approved funds—including foreign aid and money for NPR and PBS. The White House says more rescissions are coming. Are we watching Congress give up the power of the purse?

Bill Scher:
I’m writing about this for tomorrow. To set the stage: Congress passes annual spending bills, called discretionary spending. These usually get bundled into omnibus or minibus bills when deadlines approach and deals are struck.

This year, Congress passed three such packages for FY2025. Trump signed the last one in March. But now, through a legal workaround, they’ve passed a partisan rescissions bill that rolls back some of that funding.

It’s legal under the Impoundment Control Act—but it undercuts the original bipartisan deal. And Trump’s budget director has made clear: more rescissions are coming. He even said the appropriations process should be less bipartisan.

Anne Kim:
So what can Democrats do?

Bill Scher:
They could walk away. Republicans want to govern solo—let them.

Now, the tricky part is: you can’t do discretionary spending through reconciliation, so if Democrats withdraw, how does the government stay open?

Two options:

1. Republicans change the rules to pass everything on a party-line vote.
2. Republicans backtrack and agree to protect future bills from rescissions.

I doubt either happens. But Democrats don’t need to fill in the gaps anymore. Republicans asked for one-party rule—let them figure it out.

Matthew Cooper:
And this exposes the hypocrisy of Republicans who used to champion “regular order.” For years they’ve bemoaned omnibus bills and backroom deals. But now they’re undercutting the very norms they said they wanted to restore.

Democrats can claim the high ground: If Trump wants to eliminate the Education Department, fine—but follow the law. Don’t do it by memo from the OMB.

Paul Glastris:
Exactly. The rescissions may technically be legal, but it’s Congress voluntarily weakening itself. Better than Trump doing it unilaterally? Maybe. But we’re inching toward a system where Congress abdicates control over spending—its most fundamental constitutional power.

Bill Scher:
To be fair, the rescissions process is codified in the Empowerment Act. The president proposes cuts, and Congress votes. This time, they did it on a party-line basis—legal, but dishonorable, because it breaks the bipartisan agreement that got the original appropriations passed.

Other moves—mass firings, gutting USAID, shuttering the Education Department—are unilateral and legally murkier. But in spirit, it’s the same. The Constitution is supposed to ensure checks and balances. If Republicans no longer want shared power, they should own it—and be held accountable in 2026.

What We’re Watching

Anne Kim:
So in the last few minutes we have, I want to ask what each of you is watching for this week.

Matthew Cooper:
Trump has weighed in on the Washington Commanders—he’s threatening to block the deal to build a new stadium in D.C. unless the team changes its name back to the Redskins. He’s also made similar threats to the Cleveland Guardians, formerly the Indians.

This could be a fleeting culture war flare-up—or it could be something he sticks with. He does have some leverage: the new stadium is planned for federally owned land leased to the District on a 99-year lease. Trump could try to use that as a pressure point. So this distraction could actually become a real policy fight.

Paul Glastris:
Another one to watch—maybe not this week, but in the coming weeks—is redistricting. Trump wants Texas to redraw its congressional maps to make it harder for Democrats to take back the House in 2026. Gavin Newsom in California says if Texas does that, he’ll push to eliminate GOP-leaning districts in California.

Other Democratic governors and legislatures are saying the same. So we’re seeing the beginning of a giant game of political chicken over redistricting power. Who has the nerve—and the authority—to follow through? It’s going to be worth tracking.

Bill Scher:
Looking a little ahead: the Senate is supposed to wrap up its summer session at the end of July. But Trump is demanding they extend it to confirm more of his nominees, including judicial appointments. So this becomes another test of loyalty. Do Republicans really want their summer vacation—or do they want to prove they’re with Trump?

Anne Kim:
And among those nominees is Emil Bove. He’s facing major opposition—a letter opposing his confirmation has been signed by more than 900 former Justice Department employees and lawyers. So the question becomes: does he even have the votes? And if not, will Schumer or the majority leader think it’s worth sticking around to try?

Matthew Cooper:
And just to note, The Monthly was the first to flag Bove as a potential Supreme Court nominee if a vacancy opens during Trump’s second term. Trump is no longer aligned with Leonard Leo or the Federalist Society. He’s looking for loyalists now—not Kavanaughs. Bové fits that bill perfectly.

Anne Kim:
I’m looking forward to speaking with economist Rob Shapiro later this week for the podcast. He has a new piece up with his forecast for the U.S. economy, and we’ll dig into it together.

Thanks to everyone for tuning in to the Politics Roundtable. I’m Anne Kim, joined today by Washington Monthly editor-in-chief Paul Glastris, politics editor Bill Scher, and executive editor for digital Matt Cooper. Have a great week, and see you next time.

The post Trump Turns on Putin, Ducks Epstein, and Congress Rolls Over appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s July 7, 2025, and the “One Big Beautiful Bill” is now law. With it, President Trump has reshaped the domestic policy landscape—delivering front-loaded tax breaks while slashing Medicaid and scientific research, launching aggressive immigration crackdowns alongside flashy but fleeting baby bonds. In the first Washington Monthly Politics Livestream since the bill’s passage, contributing editor Anne Kim is joined by Executive Editor-Digital Matthew Cooper and Politics Editor Bill Scher to break down what just happened—and what comes next.

What does $3.3 trillion in new deficits mean for the future of fiscal politics? Will voters feel the pain before the midterms—or the benefits? Could tariffs and immigration raids backfire on Republicans? And what’s Elon Musk doing trying to start a third party?

Below is a transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for readability.

You can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

Anne Kim: Hey, good morning, Matt.

Matthew Cooper: Good morning, Anne.

Anne Kim: So, Congress did meet its self-imposed July 4th deadline to pass President Trump’s signature domestic policy agenda. He had a showy signing ceremony at the White House with bombers flying overhead and the band playing the national anthem. For a while, it looked like the House Freedom Caucus—the so-called budget hawks—might balk at a bill that adds $3.3 trillion to the deficit. But that’s not what happened. Were you surprised the House Republicans and some Senate moderates caved?

Matthew Cooper: Frequent viewers will know I was a tower of Jello about whether this would pass. I thought it might not. But it makes sense—House Republicans are very afraid of Trump and of being primaried. Senator Thom Tillis dropped out of his reelection bid after Trump threatened a primary. Cause and effect? Hard to say, but it looked that way. They passed it, and now they own it. There are no Democratic fingerprints on it. My guess is it’s not going to get more popular.

Anne Kim: Let’s talk about what they now own. Polling showed a majority opposed the bill before it passed, but many didn’t know what was in it. Trump’s allies believe the front-loaded goodies—like no tax on tips and the misleading promise of no tax on Social Security—can win people over. Do you think this sell job will work, or will Democrats hang the bill around Republicans?

Matthew Cooper: If I had to guess, it’s going to be tough. A lot of the bill is just continuing current tax cuts, so most people won’t see much change. Some front-loaded goodies exist, but a lot of bad stuff kicks in early. They couldn’t push it all past 2026 or 2028. People will lose Medicaid coverage, there are serious Medicare cuts, and other program cuts. If the economy remains strong, Trump might not suffer politically. But if it dips, people’s opinion of both him and the bill will worsen.

Anne Kim: The Medicaid cuts fully kick in after the midterms. If Democrats control Congress in 2027, they could be blamed. The goodies expire in 2028. Did you get that misleading Social Security email?

Matthew Cooper: Yes. It gave the impression benefits are no longer taxed.

Anne Kim: Which isn’t true. It just expands the deduction to $6,000 for individuals and $12,000 for couples. It might help some seniors, but doesn’t exempt all Social Security benefits. Also, two-thirds of seniors already don’t pay income tax on their benefits because their incomes are too low. So, minimal benefit—lots of hot air.

Matthew Cooper: Right. Also, state-level pressure is growing. COVID funds are gone, economies are tight. Here in the Mid-Atlantic, D.C. and Maryland face big budget cuts. That will affect the states’ ability to contribute.

Anne Kim: Exactly. Work reporting requirements kick in after the midterms. States will have to prepare compliance systems, costing money and creating press headaches. Many will lose coverage due to reporting issues.

Matthew Cooper: Right. Money will go to contractors. Paperwork burdens will hit people with multiple jobs. This has unintended consequences.

Anne Kim: Substantively, this bill changes the economy, the role of government, and our fiscal health. What worries you most long-term?

Matthew Cooper: Cuts to scientific research. For 80 years, we’ve invested in grants for universities, leading to breakthroughs in space, tech, and biomedicine. With NIH cuts, top researchers may leave or stop working. That’s bad for the country. And the deficit—these are bigger than during the financial crisis or COVID. This should’ve been a time to reduce it. There’s a limit to borrowing if confidence in U.S. bonds erodes.

Anne Kim: In 2025, interest on the debt will be $952 billion—more than Medicaid ($607B) or the military ($883B). That’s like credit card interest crowding out spending.

Matthew Cooper: Yes, and rates may still rise.

Anne Kim: Bill, what’s the most damaging long-term impact of this bill?

Bill Scher: It’s harming our health insurance system and SNAP. Democrats will need to campaign on restoring them, which will require new spending. The debt adds pressure. Raising taxes on the rich is politically easy, but if they have to go beyond that, it gets dicier. At some point, Democrats will face a choice: be the party of good governance and take the political hit—or become like Republicans and just hand out benefits without paying for them. That could stress their coalition.

Anne Kim: Meanwhile, we’ve got these thousand-dollar Trump baby accounts for newborns—for just four years. Maybe not big enough to override criticism, but who knows?

Bill Scher: It’s hard for Democrats to oppose baby bonds. But because it’s a one-time deposit, upper-income families will benefit most—likely worsening wealth gaps. Democrats may try to expand it, and that’s more spending.

Matthew Cooper: Right. And unlike Clinton, Obama, or even Biden, future Democrats won’t have low interest rates or big majorities. Cleaning up this mess will be harder.

Anne Kim: But hey, tariffs will raise revenue, right?

Matthew Cooper: Unless we “cut great deals,” as Trump claims.

Anne Kim: Wednesday marks the end of the 90-day pause on the Liberation Day tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says there’s a reprieve until August 1. Trump promised 90 deals in 90 days. We have, maybe, two and a half?

Matthew Cooper: Yeah. Frameworks, discussions, concepts—no real deals.

Bill Scher: If tariffs stay high, they bring revenue—helpful for Democrats. But if they make groceries more expensive, that hurts Republicans. Democrats could then campaign to end tariffs—but replacing that lost revenue won’t be easy.

Matthew Cooper: Tariffs may raise revenue, but they’ll cause layoffs too—dockworkers, car dealers, others. Hard to see a positive outcome.

Anne Kim: Tariffs are taxes. They’re regressive and hurt lower-income consumers the most—especially for goods from places like Vietnam.

Matthew Cooper: And businesses that moved production to Vietnam now face high tariffs again. Trump frames it as American vs. foreign goods—but we can’t manufacture everything here, like coffee or electronics. Consumers will pay more.

Bill Scher: The bill also boosts ICE funding and ramps up immigration enforcement. Combined with tariffs and cuts, this attempt to nationalize the economy could trigger short-term calamity. Economists warn this approach isn’t viable. Immigrants help the workforce and don’t necessarily suppress wages. Democrats could make a strong case for interconnected markets and immigration.

Anne Kim: Let’s talk about immigration’s political cost. Interior enforcement is ramping up. Detention videos are circulating. One site—Alligator Alcatraz in Florida—was showcased in a bizarre government video. Thoughts?

Matthew Cooper: It’s cruel and not a real deterrent. People willing to walk through jungles won’t be scared by this. It’s just sadistic.

Bill Scher: Trump got away with harsh immigration rhetoric because people thought it didn’t affect them. That illusion is fading. In diverse states like Florida, this could backfire.

Anne Kim: Border crossings are at historic lows. Trump’s 3,000-arrests-per-day target means lots of wrongful detentions.

Bill Scher: That number requires interior deportations—likely of people working and contributing. Politically risky.

Matthew Cooper: And Trump’s trying to reassure farm owners, saying seasonal workers are safe. But he’s clearly planning for more mass enforcement.

Anne Kim: A New York Times article quoted Senator Ruben Gallego advocating for border security, deporting criminals, and a humane path to legal status. Is that a winning formula?

Bill Scher: That’s been the Democratic position for years. The 2020 debate moment on decriminalizing border crossings confused the issue. But Democrats want an orderly system—secure borders, asylum processing, and worker programs. That’s long been the stance.

Matthew Cooper: Right. Democrats can modify the “path to citizenship” idea if needed—make it about residency. Still, the broader point is that we need immigrants, even if that means dealing with some unauthorized entries.

Anne Kim: Quick final question: Elon Musk is flirting with a third party, the “America Party.” How seriously should we take it?

Matthew Cooper: Not very. Austerity politics won’t sell, especially from a billionaire.

Bill Scher: Perot got 19% in ‘92 and helped shape the debate. Musk could be a spoiler, but he lacks discipline. Perot had actual policy ideas; Musk doesn’t yet.

Matthew Cooper: Even pushing the major parties counts as success. But Perot had credibility Musk doesn’t.

Anne Kim: And deficit politics are a tough sell from someone who pumped Dogecoin. In ’92, it was tied to welfare reform. Not sure that link exists now.

Bill Scher: If Musk just pushes cuts for the poor, that’s a nonstarter. Perot’s message was about shared sacrifice, not just punching down.

Anne Kim: If you’re a cynical Democrat, you might welcome the spoiler potential.

Matthew Cooper: Oh yeah, it’s payday for consultants.

Anne Kim: What are you watching this week?

Matthew Cooper: NYC mayoral race—seeing if Cuomo drops out and whether the opposition to Mamdani can organize.

Bill Scher: The rescissions package due July 18. Big impact on FY26 appropriations. Could determine if we face a government shutdown.

Anne Kim: No such thing as a sleepy summer.

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The post Welcome to Trump’s America, Again appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On today’s episode of the Washington Monthly Politics Livestream, the editors break down what’s inside Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”—and why it might be the most self-sabotaging legislation the GOP could pass. From Medicaid cuts and renewable energy rollbacks to a tax system rigged for the ultra-wealthy, the bill manages to hit Trump’s own voters hardest. Plus: the stunning rise of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York, and why the Iran strike may have done more to expose American weakness than deter nuclear escalation.

Their conversation is below, edited for clarity:

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” — What’s in It and Why It’s So Unpopular

Anne Kim: Welcome. It’s June 30, and today is D-Day in the Senate for Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” It’s his signature domestic package—massive in scope and price. It extends the 2017 tax cuts—mostly benefiting the wealthy—and adds $3.3 trillion to the deficit. But it also hits Trump’s base hard, with cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and more. Bill, you’ve been covering this.

Bill Scher: The Medicaid cuts are devastating—and politically insane. Thom Tillis even called it out on the Senate floor: Republicans promised not to cut Medicaid, and here they are. This bill breaks nearly every GOP talking point—no more nine-page bills, no time to read it, everything shoved into one package. It even undermines the filibuster by barring the parliamentarian from reviewing key budget violations.

Anne: And the trick they’re using is calling soon-to-expire tax cuts “current policy,” so they can extend them without counting the cost in official budget scores.

Bill: Exactly. It’s a loophole that opens the door to massive future deficits. And for what? A bill that’s deeply unpopular—even among Republicans.

Anne: The Medicaid work requirements are another example. They’re really just paperwork traps. People will lose coverage not because they’re not working, but because they can’t navigate the red tape.

Paul Glastris: Right. It’s a flood of new bureaucracy for the working poor. Someone juggling part-time jobs across multiple employers now has to collect documentation constantly. And they’ll just give up. Same goes for SNAP. Plus, they’re killing Biden’s direct-file tax system—a simple way for millions to file taxes without stress.

Anne: States will likely hire private contractors to enforce compliance—like Georgia did after the 1996 welfare reform. That effort wasted millions and didn’t help anyone find work.

Paul: And while Trump brags about helping the working class, this bill actually cuts funding for vocational education. That was one of the few promises that appealed to working-class voters.

Bill: He consolidated 11 workforce programs into one “Make America Skills Again” grant—but slashed the total funding by a third. He also proposed a short-term Pell Grant for trade programs, but the parliamentarian threw it out. The rhetoric doesn’t match the policy. It’s nickel-and-diming, not helping.

Matt Cooper: Don’t forget renewables. Republicans used to say they supported “all of the above”—drilling, nuclear, wind, solar. But this bill goes after green energy hard. Texas has become the Saudi Arabia of wind, and solar is the cheapest energy in history—but this bill penalizes it, even geothermal and nuclear.

Paul: And they’re doing it with gimmicks: if your solar array has a single Chinese component, you lose your tax credit. Meanwhile, oil rigs are exempt. This will raise electric bills, especially in red states like Wyoming. Politically, it’s baffling.

Anne: There’s also a raft of anti-immigrant provisions: taxing remittances, cutting hospital reimbursements for emergency immigrant care, and spending $90 billion on detention and wall funding.

Paul: Taxing remittances is especially cruel. It hits immigrant families directly. And for what? A rounding error in the budget.

Bill: The immigrant-bashing is expected. What’s surprising is how many provisions quietly target the GOP base. Some of it seems like frantic scrambling for savings—last-minute cuts that haven’t been thought through.

Anne: Like eliminating the “de minimis” rule for imports—no more tax-free Shein hauls. Or ending Medicaid eligibility for people whose homes are worth more than $1 million. That sounds like it targets the wealthy, but in coastal states, it could affect long-time homeowners and their spouses.

Paul: And all of this is being done to extend tax breaks for the top 1%. Estate tax relief, pass-through loopholes, you name it. Politically, there’s very little upside.

Will the Bill Pass by Trump’s July 4 Deadline?

Anne: Trump wants this passed by Independence Day. Realistically—can Republicans pull it off?

Matt: Maybe. No one wants to be blamed for killing it. But now that it’s bouncing back to the House, there’s real resistance. The House sees this as toxic.

Bill: It might not even pass the Senate. Rand Paul and Thom Tillis are out. If Murkowski or Collins balk—and Collins has bad poll numbers—it could fall apart. And even if it clears the Senate, some House Republicans are now revolting over the deeper Medicaid cuts.

Zohran Mamdani Defeats Cuomo: A Harbinger for Democrats?

Anne: In NYC, DSA-backed Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary. He ran on rent freezes, free bus service, and public grocery stores. Is this the future of the party?

Matt: I wouldn’t say Mamdani-style socialism is about to sweep the country. The center of gravity is still with moderates like Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. But Mamdani’s win shows discontent with the establishment. His platform—rent freezes, free buses, public grocery stores—resonated, especially with young voters.

And there’s real frustration with party leaders being too cautious, especially on affordability and Gaza. Mamdani’s victory shows how the left is gaining traction in cities—and that anti-Israel views aren’t political suicide anymore.

Paul: Young voters are furious. They feel locked out of housing, trapped in low-paying jobs, and failed by free-market solutions. Mamdani taps into that energy. Even if his math doesn’t add up, he reflects a real sentiment in the party.

Matt: There’s also an overreaction happening. Some rich New Yorkers are fleeing to Palm Beach, convinced Mamdani’s going to nationalize Merrill Lynch. But mayors still answer to bond markets. Even Bernie Sanders had to balance budgets in Burlington.

Paul: And Mamdani’s platform overlaps interestingly with both the abundance liberals and the anti-monopoly left. He wants to cut red tape for small businesses and help local entrepreneurs—ideas that could unite different factions of the Democratic coalition.

Iran Strike Fallout

Anne: Finally, let’s talk Iran. After last week’s U.S. strike on nuclear sites, new reports suggest the attack only delayed Iran’s program by months—despite Trump claiming it was “obliterated.”

Matt: We don’t know the full picture yet. But this much is clear: Trump pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal, which had unprecedented inspections. That gave Iran a head start. Now he’s back with a failed military strike, hoping for a different outcome.

Bill: The irony is that Republicans mocked Obama’s deal for having a sunset. But if Trump’s strike only delays things by a few years, it’s no better—and arguably worse, because now Iran has greater incentive to build a bomb.

Paul: And if these bunker busters didn’t do deep damage, that’s a strategic loss. For years, our ability to threaten underground facilities was part of our deterrence. Now the world knows that may have been a bluff.

What We’re Watching

Matt: SCOTUS just ruled that lower courts can’t issue nationwide injunctions. I’m watching how aggressively the administration moves to enforce its repeal of birthright citizenship.

Paul: That ruling, and others, are nudging us toward an autocratic interpretation of the Constitution.

Bill: I’m on Supreme Court retirement watch. If Alito or Thomas want to step down while the GOP still controls the Senate, this is their window.

Anne: And don’t forget—Trump’s 90-day tariff pause ends Tuesday. We’ll see if it’s Taco Tuesday… or Tariff Tuesday.

Thanks for watching. See you next week.

The post GOP Budget Bill: One Big Betrayal appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Participants:

• Anne Kim, Contributing Editor and podcast host, Washington Monthly
• Paul Glastris, Editor-in-Chief, Washington Monthly
• Matthew Cooper, Executive Editor Digital, Washington Monthly
• Jacob Heilbrunn, Editor, The National Interest

A transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity:

Anne Kim: Welcome to the Washington Monthly Politics Livestream. Today is June 23rd, 2025. So what happens when an isolationist president goes to war? 

Paul Glastris: So there’s so much to talk about. Let me kind of give you my take on it and you guys can react to it. You can agree, you can disagree. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we do have a pretty good sense of how we got here. And the way I would formulate how we got here is, Donald Trump inherited just a few months ago when he became president a second time, a situation inherited from Joe Biden that allowed him to do what he did over the weekend. That is, the United States’s proxy governments, primarily Israel and Ukraine, had so weakened the adversaries of the United States, primarily Iran and Russia, that Donald Trump could bomb these nuclear development sites with minimal immediate military risk. That was the opportunity he was given.

The ultimate reason that he felt it necessary to do this—because he did not want to, he would much rather have cut a deal—is the deal he got out of in his first term, which was the one negotiated by Barack Obama where Iran agreed to limit its development of nuclear fuel and freeze its nuclear weapons activities. Those are the two things that are the backdrop to how we got here. And let me just ask Jacob, who has given a lot of thought to this, to react to that idea.

Jacob Heilbrunn: Paul, I do think you’re onto something and as we talked about earlier, the media has downplayed or overlooked the fact that it was Trump who ripped up Obama’s deal with Iran originally and set us on the path to war with Iran. I have to say, frankly, I’m not sure any of this was necessary and my gut is that we are going to discover in coming days and weeks that this does look very much like Iraq War number two. And frankly, I have the willies about the whole thing.

If you look at the New York Times headline last night, it was that the administration doesn’t know where the highly processed uranium is.

Paul Glastris: Yeah, apparently there were imaging and intel that showed trucks near the basis of these underground bunkers moving stuff out days before the bombing.

Jacob Heilbrunn: Now, past does not have to be prologue. Maybe Trump by some miracle pulls it all off. However, what we’re seeing looks pretty darn similar to what we saw before, which is that there is in fact no plan for any of this. And then what results is chaos.

This takes us back—I’m not drifting from your question. This is the very reason that even though Biden may have set up the preconditions for Trump’s assault on Iran, I’m highly dubious that Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, if she were president now, would have pulled the trigger on these facilities because in essence, he has opened up a Pandora’s box. Every previous presidency, including George W. Bush, by the way, who was being urged to attack Iran rather than Iraq in 2003—he thought Iraq would be the easy country to topple. Well, this is why everyone has flinched.

Trump, I think who was egged on by the generals who have scores to settle with Iran, dating back to the Iraq War, because it was Iranian munitions, IEDs that were the most lethal weapons targeting American soldiers. So I think Trump is an impulsive guy. The incentives were all there for him. He wants to go down in history as a great president. He was looking weak over the past month. Everything lined up for him to do this. 

Matthew Cooper: Yeah, and I would say just to build on what Paul and Jacob have said, it’s not only that Trump threw out the JCPOA, the nuclear agreement that the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany and Iran had forged that seemed to keep Iran in the box. It may not have been perfect, but it had a “get the job done” quality that was basically working.

But Trump, after having thrown it out in his first term, in his second term reopened the souq, so to speak, to try to form his own JCPOA and was giving away the store. I think this is the guy who was ready to bring the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11 when he was trying to cut an agreement with the Afghan regime. And so I think there was a certain—look, Bibi obviously is an unprincipled character who is trying to ensure his own survival. I think the Israelis had a legitimate reason to think we were seeing “give away the store” Trump with Iran. I think Bibi’s always been predisposed to move on Iran. I think he had even more cause. And so Trump not only screwed himself and put us in this box as you all said by throwing out the JCPOA originally but then by trying to go back and form his own JCPOA or unilateral version thereof. Madness.

Anne Kim: What do you think Trump’s options are from here? What can he do?

Paul Glastris: He can listen. Look, Jacob is right. There are generals out there and the four-star who was in command of this mission is someone who’s well known to be very aggressive. So if you ask the general in the field, who’s got a reputation for aggressiveness, “Hey, what do you think we should do?” He’s going to say, “Go for it.”

At the same time, I was speaking earlier this morning to a longtime source in the national security arena with direct operational knowledge of the region right now. He was reminding me that in the past, like when the United States took out this senior military official, Soleimani, the Iranians did some—or I think it was their proxies—some strikes at US military bases, I believe in Iraq. They sort of signaled to the US that they were limited, let them know they were coming in advance. And the US retaliated in a limited way. The regime is going to have to do something.

What the regime, if it’s wise, and it’s not shown a lot of wisdom recently, if it’s wise, will do what it did last time, which is not want to go up the escalatory ladder, right? Because the United States has far more ability if it wants to retaliate hugely. And so, you know, something limited, something signaled in advance, then the wise thing to answer your question, is for the Trump administration to listen to the generals. And I think this is what they’re going to hear from the generals, you know?

There is a performative quality to this. Let’s retaliate, but not escalate too much and then see where that goes. And if you do that, you might have this sort of not be Armageddon. But if the Iranians choose to mine the Strait of Hormuz, if they start really harassing our ships in the region—our Navy hates being in that region because they’re vulnerable—if the retaliations are persistent and escalatory, then Trump and the Pentagon are going to be very, very tempted to just destroy the Iranian Navy. You know, our military has the ability to do that to really escalate and boy then you’re at war.

(Update from the Associated Press: “Iran said its Monday night missile attack on Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar matched the number of bombs dropped by the United States on its nuclear sites this weekend, signaling its likely desire to deescalate.”)

Jacob Heilbrunn: The problem, Paul, is that the Iranians must feel like their back is to the wall. When you have Trump coming out calling for, of all things, regime change in a tweet last night, I don’t know that the Iranians can distinguish perfectly between reality and hallucination with Trump. And the other part is that Trump has clearly lied to the Iranians.

I mean, it looks like these negotiations were camouflage for an assault. You couple that with his language. And the Israelis are still heavily bombing Iran. And my sense is that they would like to do to it what they did to Syria, which is devastate it as a military power. It’s not about nuclear weapons. It’s about eviscerating the Iranian military.

And Israel emerges as the hegemon of the Middle East. There will be no other power in the Middle East that commands the kind of military might that Israel does. Syria’s gone. Lebanon has been disposed of. Iraq was invaded and is not a threat. Iran was the big menace. I think we’re headed for a much greater conflict.

Matthew Cooper: It can always get worse. I think that’s a good instinct. Just to take a little bit of a glass-half-full advocacy, especially after speaking to a source who’s really steeped in this this morning. I think the Iranians are fairly limited in their response for now. It doesn’t mean they can’t mine the Strait of Hormuz, but I don’t think they’re totally irrational actors. I think they will take action, but I suspect they have a lot of options from killing dissidents overseas—a strike in the US on Iranian dissidents is not impossible. And frankly, something Trump’s immigration people might like.

So I think they’re somewhat limited there. And I think also Trump by nature does not have the George W. Bush, Dick Cheney messianic belief in democracy in the Middle East. Thank goodness, you know, he does not really—he’s not a democrat to begin with, small d. And I don’t think he has any intention of thinking it can take root overseas. So that’s at least one thing to counsel against him wanting to get in there. But I agree with you, it can definitely get much worse.

Jacob Heilbrunn: Let me just interject quickly, Matt, because one thing worries me about what you said, which is that Trump operates like a mob boss. And I don’t think he’s going to take—or he’s in it already. And if the Iranians defy him, I think his instinct is to crush them.

Matthew Cooper: You could well be right.

Anne Kim: Well, let’s turn now to the question of how Congress will or should react. We’re grappling with two separate but overlapping questions here, the first being the legality of the strike because when the Constitution says only Congress can declare war, are we in a war? And number two, whether the strike was the right thing to do, legal or not.

So on that first question, we have senators like Tim Kaine of Virginia who wanted Trump to get congressional approval before this. And now in the House, you’ve got Tom Massie and Ro Khanna of California arguing the same. On the other hand, you’ve got senators like Lindsey Graham, who say Trump was well within his rights. You’ve also got these diehard MAGA isolationists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and progressives like AOC arguing on the other side that the strikes were a mistake.

So how do you see all of this in Congress sorting out? And how durable is that loyalty to Trump on the MAGA side of the aisle, Jacob, you can speak to this. And when and if the backlash will begin.

Jacob Heilbrunn: I think the Democrats are largely positioning themselves if this is a failure to be able to denounce Trump. And I think it’s the right political call. They really don’t have much choice. And Trump is behaving in this conflict—it’s another opportunity for him to display his contempt for Congress. He didn’t even consult the Democrats. It probably is unconstitutional what he did, but he doesn’t care.

And you have Bob Kagan arguing that it’s prelude to upping authoritarianism in the US, which I don’t think is going to happen because I think this war is going to be a fiasco.

Paul Glastris: I mean, just as a general matter, Congress has for decades now progressively given away its power over the executive in matters of war. We are already seeing major MAGA figures like Charlie Kirk come round to supporting Trump on this, who were hardcore isolationists, you know, America Firsters, which was all perfectly predictable. I think the MAGA forces that are still against what Trump did and are gonna try to hold out will do as the Democrats are doing. And, you know, hold their powder, but hope that things do go poorly and be ready to pounce when they do.

I think it’s wise and strategically smart for Democrats and others to bring up the abuse of separation of powers that we’re seeing. I just don’t see any possibility that it matters in the near term.

Matthew Cooper: Let me take a somewhat different take, which is I think the Democrats are in more of a pickle, both intellectually and politically. I think intellectually, look, they were more than willing to let the authorization for the use of military force that Congress passed after 9/11 be extended to include Libya and other nations in Africa to use drone strikes promiscuously. I think now you can say there’s a difference between that and this, and maybe there is, but I think it’s a harder case to make when they’ve relied on a rather elastic definition of presidential war-making powers.

And then second, politically, I think if you look at something like Hakeem Jeffries’ statement, and I agree keeping your powder dry, being in a position to pounce when this thing goes south, as I agree with Jacob, it most likely will. But nevertheless, I think there was a certain churlishness. And I think if you were online the last couple of days and saw the reaction of prominent Jewish groups and Democrats, Jewish Democrats and others, being surprised about the somewhat churlish quality of this. I mean, the degrading of the Iranian nuclear threat and with all the dangers that come with it is still something that is not totally to be sniffed at.

And in that sense, I think Democrats can’t look either too legalistic or too eager for this to fail. I’d say keep your powder dry, but don’t—you know, keep your condemnations of Iran up. And there was none of that in, for instance, the Hakeem Jeffries statement last night, or Saturday night, Sunday night, excuse me.

Jacob Heilbrunn: The key will be gas prices.

Anne Kim: Yeah, I was going to get to that question. Jacob, in the five minutes we have remaining with you. Let’s talk about what the impact of this war is going to be on Americans here at home, including now a very heightened risk of a global recession because of gas prices. But there are other threats too. Matt, you alluded to this with the idea of unconventional retaliation that Iran could do. There was a white paper from 2016 from the Idaho National Laboratory warning of cyber attacks on the nation’s power grid and specifically cited Iran as a potential threat. So you’ve got these kinds of unconventional threats out there. What could we expect to see in the worst case scenario? What can we expect to see inevitably as a result of this conflict?

Jacob Heilbrunn: It would be a good time to take down America’s electric grid with 100-degree temperatures across the country. I think that there will be, if this war grinds on and—we are now begging the Chinese, the Trump administration went to China and asked them to ensure that Iran does not close the Strait of Hormuz. So that vitiates Trump’s leverage there with China. And if gas—you know, oil is at around 80—if it goes above 100, people will become very unhappy in the United States. That would be a good issue for the Democrats. They can start putting the “thank you Donald” stickers on the gas pumps the way people did with Biden.

Paul Glastris: I think the bottom line to your question is anybody who says they know what’s going to happen next hasn’t been reading the news over the last two decades very carefully. The unpredictability of what’s going to happen—there’s just too many variables. You know, Matt, I’m torn as to whether a Democratic president in the situation Trump was in—imagine, you know, Kamala Harris had been elected. She would possibly have been in a better position to get a deal with Iran diplomatically. But, you know, the damage had been done by Trump. If you assume they were in the same position, Jacob said no Democrat—or, I’m not sure a Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have made the same choice as Donald Trump did. I don’t know about Kamala Harris, but it wasn’t the easiest call in the world given the conditions. And so we’re going to know maybe in 10 years whether this was wise. I don’t think we’re going to know in three months or six months, or certainly tomorrow.

Anne Kim: Well, I think it’s pretty clear that the economy—well, he could have put the economy in a better position to absorb a shock like this one, but with the tariffs in place, this one big beautiful bill is going to increase our deficit situation, the deportations he’s carrying out that are also wreaking havoc on the economy. To me, it seems kind of clear that this is a mistake for the US economy, at least if nothing else. 

Matthew Cooper: I think that’s totally right.

Paul Glastris: I see no way that it helps.

Jacob Heilbrunn: I don’t think it’s going to take as long to figure this out, Paul. I think it’s already starting to erode. And the other part of the problem that we haven’t talked about is, look, obviously Bibi maneuvered this brilliantly on his own behalf, not in America’s interest. And Trump’s team is a team of clowns. Frank Bruni has a good piece in The New York Times today. These guys are not capable of conducting a longer-term conflict, nor by the way is Trump who has the attention span of a gnat. He reacts impulsively to every latest development. I don’t believe that these guys can safely steward our fortunes now that they have triggered this conflict.

Paul Glastris: One hundred percent, 100 percent. Right. And we devoted half of our last livestream to precisely the point that Jacob made, which is we haven’t had a national security team with less experience of running major national security operations in our lifetime.

Jacob Heilbrunn: The other point, Paul, is that they don’t even have a process. There’s no one drafting papers. No one’s figured out, well, here’s what the Iranians would do with uranium. But apparently The New York Times is reporting that the Iranians, based on Trump’s tweets, started moving the uranium. I mean, this is a one-man show.

Matthew Cooper: No. Yeah, they do have the apps.

Paul Glastris: They do have a signal channel, apparently.

Anne Kim: And they do have a social media channel too.

Paul Glastris: I hope we know sooner rather than later the fallout from this. I would not personally predict that in six months people are going to say, “I’m so glad Donald Trump took out these missile facilities.” You know, as a matter of operation, regardless of the killing of some senior scientists, Iran has been at this now for decades. There’s really not too many examples of countries being stripped of their capacities to produce nuclear weapons. These things are now embedded in their networks, their knowledge base. And if they have the equipment and the fuel, they can still do it.

And let us also go back to the point about the Obama agreement. With the Obama agreement, we had international inspectors swarming Iran and though it is technically possible and conservatives went on and on about these very unlikely possibilities of the Iranians being able to operate outside of those inspections. They were very protological in their sweep. That’s all gone. Right. And what we knew came from international inspectors. That’s now gone. So our ability to know what they’re doing is now gone. And we are looking at Iran the way we looked at Iraq, which is we had no idea whether they did or did not have nuclear capacity.

Matthew Cooper: Right, as my source said this morning it’s conjecture, but certainly plausible, had we stuck with JCPOA, that really might have led to regime change. I mean, there really was a lot of dissatisfaction with the mullahs, and we may find out that Trump has saved the regime in Tehran.

Jacob Heilbrunn: Bibi has won.

Anne Kim: Bibi has won. Well, Jacob, I want to thank you for joining us this morning. I know you need to run to another podcast. Jacob Heilbrunn, who’s the editor of The National Interest and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Eurasia Center. Jacob, thank you so much for taking time out of your morning to come on to the show. Hope to see you again.

The post Trump’s War Gamble: “Isolationist” President Opens Pandora’s Box With Iran appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Washington Monthly Editor in Chief Paul Glastris, Politics Editor Bill Scher and Executive Editor for Digital Matt Cooper join Anne Kim to talk about this weekend’s protests, Trump’s flop of a military parade, political violence in Minnesota, and the prospect of a regional war in the Middle East.

Trump’s Military Parade vs. No Kings Protests

Anne Kim: Let’s start with the military parade, which was ostensibly for the 250th birthday of the army, but also Trump’s 79th birthday as well. It cost at least $45 million, and it was hyped as this huge extravaganza. At the same time, we had a nationwide day of “No Kings” protests, where there were more than 2,000 gatherings nationwide. So I think there’s probably plenty of reason to believe Trump was disappointed and that his parade was upstaged by the protests.

What do you guys think? Matt, you wrote about this right beforehand. What’s your verdict on the impact of the protests versus the parade?

Matthew Cooper: It was low energy, as the president used to say about Jeb Bush. People who thought they were getting a Nuremberg rally were disappointed by what was more of a lackadaisical state fair parade. There was a fair amount of space between each one of these military vehicles. And since they were kind of a monotone green throughout the whole thing, except for the flybys of the Chinooks and the Apaches, it was a fairly sedate affair with fairly low attendance. So I think you’re right to suggest that deep in his dark heart, the president probably found it disappointing.

I think the protests were a rousing success. They were well attended, they were peaceful, they were ubiquitous across the country. So in that sense, for Trump opponents it was a big plus. I have to confess, I thought it would be more of a menacing spectacle than it was. I think in the end, it was more a celebration of the army than him, although he included himself in some of the video asides. But it was less authoritarian in its final delivery than I think those who pictured a Red Square parade or a Pyongyang Kim Jong-un style affair expected. What they got was more sedate and more celebratory of the army than of him.

Anne Kim: I don’t know if you guys saw the viral video of the squeaky tank that was rolling down pretty much silent streets. For me that kind of said it all. Bill and Paul, what do you guys think?

Paul Glastris: I attended a No Kings rally out on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and watched some of the Trump birthday army parade on cable—CNN and Fox. I basically have Matt’s take on it. I would say that from what I’ve read of people who were there, it was enjoyable for people who were there. The soldiers seemed to enjoy doing it.

The thing to remember is the army hated this idea, abhorred this idea. Remember Trump tried to get this to happen in his first term and his defense secretary, Jim Mattis, who was a career army officer, absolutely refused to do it for the reasons that Matt said—he didn’t want an authoritarian spectacle.

That may have been what Trump wanted. It is not what the army delivered. The army delivered a recruitment campaign and a history lesson. They had Sherman tanks from World War II and they had mounted soldiers to reflect World War I and they had drones to reflect today’s equipment. And it was a sedate and staid affair—not a projection of US power, which if that’s what Trump wanted, he didn’t get.

Matthew Cooper: Without the missile launchers you don’t get that Kim Jong-un vibe, and since the Air Force and the Navy have the ICBMs you’re never gonna get the really big ones.

Paul Glastris: That’s right. And on the other hand, there were probably on the order of 5 million people who protested around the country at the No Kings rallies and maybe 50,000 who showed up for the parade in Washington. So that’s 100 to one attendance difference.

From my own experience and reading about these No Kings events, they were all rooted in 1776. They were American flags. They were not transgressive or aggressive. And they were very clever. The signs were—there was a gay pride event at the same time as the No Kings event in Easton, Maryland. And one woman had a sign that said “No Kings, Just Queens.” There was a lot of that kind of fun that people had, often at Trump’s expense. So I think history looking back will not look at this as a particularly great day for Donald Trump and maybe a good day for America.

Bill Scher: I think one of the reasons why the military parade ended up not being as disturbing as anticipated is that so many other disturbing authoritarian things have already happened that are not merely symbolic. And so a few tanks on the street pales in comparison to actually unleashing the national guard on human beings within the United States.

It is also clearly more than leavened by the outpouring of opposition to Trump in the No Kings protests. On that score, I have a long-standing skepticism of rallies and protests that lack specific asks—Occupy Wall Street, Women’s March—things of that nature, because it’s harder to decide what do you do with all this energy and where are you taking it the next day? This arguably has that challenge as well.

I’m probably more favorable to No Kings than these other ones, because there was a real risk of demoralization amongst the progressive diaspora. You saw that depression in the first weeks of the second Trump presidency. And this is a very clear indication that folks are not giving up and want to get back in the arena and fight on. The fact that the No Kings protest so outlapped what Trump had in mind further helps with that morale.

But there is the question of what do you do next? And I don’t claim to have an easy answer for that because there are so many awful things happening all at once, it’s hard to pick one. But more people getting off the sidelines and looking for things to do on net is better than sitting at home.

Matthew Cooper: I think there was a good thread by a former political advance guy about just what a poor job of logistics and advance work it was, which if you’ve covered campaigns, you know, is a fine art. The entrances were a big mess. So actually there were pretty big crowds, but at one point they’re funneled through a single gate, which made everything pretty awful.

And then the people who were coming to the parade, many of them had to cross a hastily constructed bridge over Constitution Avenue, which was not tarped, so that it provided a perfect viewing point. So basically, everybody got up to the bridge and stopped. Maybe they could urge them along a little bit, but then the next group would stop. So this was already awful design made even worse.

There was lots and lots of this. So it was a pleasant reminder that they’re not great at execution. I mean, they’ve engaged at dazzling speed dismantling USAID, Voice of America and other things, but it’s a reminder that they’re not so consistent in their abilities.

Paul Glastris: Plus it rained.

Anne Kim: Yeah, wrecking is what they’re best at.

Public Opinion and Political Impact

Anne Kim: I want to pick up on Bill’s point about the implications of the No Kings protests. Before that, I just want to throw one data point out there about the lack of enthusiasm generally among the American public for this parade. NBC put out a poll finding that 64% of Americans disapproved of the use of government money for this parade. And that was 88% of Democrats, predictably, but also 72% of independents. And of those who approved, it was 65% of Republicans overall, but it was 75% of MAGA and 56% of Republicans. So there’s kind of like this $45 million showcase for the base. So we’ll see if that was a good return on investment.

Paul Glastris: And it’s also worth pointing out, it wasn’t covered by any of the networks. It was on cable. But we haven’t, at least as of last night, seen figures for who watched it. For Donald Trump, it’s all about the TV viewers. And my guess is that wasn’t that good.

Bill Scher: It’s also now just overshadowed by No Kings, overshadowed by what’s happening between Israel and Iran, overshadowed by the political violence in Minnesota. Trump tried in 2024 to say the world’s on fire, Joe Biden’s leading us into World War Three, everything’s utter chaos. “I’m going to restore order and sanity to the globe.” And everything around him is more and more chaos. So a military parade intended to show American force is totally discordant with what’s happening all around him. And so as a news story, it just seems irrelevant.

The Durability of the Resistance

Anne Kim: I want to get your guys’ take on the durability of the resistance. Over the weekend, we’re starting to see press reports saying that the resistance has finally arrived, and then that was followed up by other reports warning progressives not to lean in too much on the anti-ICE messaging. So what do you guys think about whether the resistance is really at a turning point? And what are the factors that could either build on this seeming momentum or kill it? Bill, you’ve already alluded to some of those factors.

Bill Scher: Look, we’re in a situation where there’s no singular leader, there is no resistance organization, there’s no singular person who directs it. And the Democratic Party doesn’t have a singular leader. We don’t have a presidential nominee yet who’s dictating “this is the strategy we’re going here and not here.” It’s all inherently—I don’t see this as a criticism just as an observation—it’s inherently diffuse and we know how this is going to work. People are going to do different things. There’s going to be disagreements on tactics. Some people want to play it safer. Some people want to be more edgy and all of these things are going to occur.

The fact that with such diffusion, you had a pretty consistent unity and lack of militancy in No Kings is sort of a precedent of itself. There was some sort of natural agreement on how the image was going to be for this. But how much do you emphasize immigration versus economics? How much do you want to weigh in on what’s happening in the Middle East? There’s not going to be consensus on any of these points. People are just going to do different things.

And it may not matter at the end of the day, when you get to—there’s sort of two things that are in front of us that I can really point to. One is the big, beautiful bill—is that going to become law or not? That is one that could have been an ask, but we didn’t really do that for this thing, but you could channel energy in that direction. Or you can just focus on the election in 2026. And where the specific choices Democrats make on that may not be relevant if the general thrust of that election is a referendum on the incumbent party. So I’m not saying it’s a totally irrelevant discussion to have, but I wouldn’t assume that a degree of disorganization on the Democratic side is going to be fatal for them.

Paul Glastris: Bill, I share your general skepticism of the power of large rallies to have long-term political policy consequences, especially when they don’t have a focused ask. The civil rights marches wanted voting rights and civil rights legislation, and it happened as a result of their actions.

That said, the Women’s March in 2017—and I had people in my house and was shuttling—it was way bigger as you recall than anyone ever thought. And it did have remarkable long-term implications or at least medium-term implications that as we look back on it are pretty impressive. Pretty good after-action reports politically on how people who attended the rallies, especially women, formed friendships with people that they had not known before, got on email lists, built networks. Those networks then became things that politicians and candidates and causes could tap to raise money, to get volunteers. It really did lead to a whole new generation of women running in 2018 and the Democrats did very well that year.

So even though it lacked a specific ask, I think it arguably had real effects. And my guess is that this rally over the weekend has a similar feel to it. Just from my brief encounter with it and reading about it, I think there was the potential to organize around things. But as you said, this is all very decentralized right now. None of the—with the possible exception of Gavin Newsom in California—no governors have really jumped ahead and made themselves the maestros of this. Certainly no one elected in Congress, Democrats have been able to make themselves the maestro. So you kind of fall back on things like this. And I just give the organizers of this thing, Indivisible is the main organizer, enormous credit. I think they did a great job.

Anne Kim: I actually think that decentralization is kind of a virtue right now because there’s so many battles on so many fronts that need to be fought and it gave people something to do. To your point earlier Bill about fighting demoralization, it gave an individual person something to do and I think you’re right Paul, people are going to sign up for various petitions, or they might sign up to volunteer because showing up to protest is a sign of something that can be done, small steps toward larger goals, and perhaps your issue is the environment, or perhaps your issue is women’s issues. The Trump administration is doing something on all of those fronts. So if people become more aware of what’s happening on all of these things, and they pick an issue and do it, and they can stop the administration on specific things, that’s a victory for them.

And yeah, it probably does need to become more focused as we get closer to the elections. But right now, a general shot across the bow to the administration that the overreach is unacceptable might be enough for the time being.

Matthew Cooper: I think this week you saw Mikie Sherrill, the representative from New Jersey, win the Democratic nomination for governor in that state, the most powerful governorship in the country. She is a member of the rather extraordinary class of 2018 of Democrats who took over the House and emerged in the wake of these protests. She’s a Naval Academy graduate.

Abigail Spanberger, who is going to be the Democratic nominee and almost certainly the next governor of Virginia is also a former member of that class and a former CIA case officer. So I think you’re seeing the fruits of the 2017-2018 efforts really come to bear not only in the takeover of the House that lasted a few years during Trump, but also in launching political careers that could have long-term statewide implications, presidential implications. It’s an arc that’s bent in the right direction for Democrats.

Paul Glastris: The way I like to think about it is, divide Democratic questions into two parts, one, the 2026 midterms and the other the 2028 presidential. For the 2026 midterms, as Bill said, it’s going to be largely a referendum on Donald Trump and policy debates and so forth are going to be not nothing but not the important considerations. 2028 is all going to be about vision for the future. It’s going to be wide open unless Donald Trump decides to run. And for that, we’re talking about which party has an economic vision for the working class, which party defines American strategy in the world, et cetera, et cetera.

That’s not where the public is at right now. That may be where the Washington Monthly spends a lot of its time thinking, because we’re thinking over the horizon, but for right now, the need for action on the part of Democrats to respond as strongly as they can to provocations, many of them unconstitutional from the Trump administration, is politically where the party needs to be.

Political Violence in Minnesota

Anne Kim: So I want to turn now to an act of really horrific violence in Minnesota, where a gunman entered the homes of two Minnesota lawmakers, assassinating one and her husband and wounding another. The assassin killed Representative Melissa Hortman, who was a top Democrat in the House, along with her husband, Mark, and State Senator John Hoffman, a fellow Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, were wounded in a separate early morning attack. So as of this morning, police have actually apprehended the suspect, a 57-year-old named Vance Boelter, and they have also found a hit list of 70 names. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has called this, quote, “an act of targeted political violence.”

So at this moment, we don’t know very many details about whether he is in fact kind of a lone wolf, as many people believe, or part of some larger effort, but what do you guys see as the threat of political violence going forward? And honestly, how much is the administration to blame for having set the conditions precedent for these kinds of incidents to occur?

Matthew Cooper: I think it’s always dicey to sort of draw a line from the actions of politicians to the actions of deranged people. Hopefully everyone uses their language in a way that does not inspire hate. I don’t think that Donald Trump has shown such restraint over the years, but nor would I draw any direct line to this guy.

Also, he seems to, at least in some earlier reporting and maybe more, have been quite motivated by his anti-abortion views. I found that both disturbing and interesting because I think there was a sense in which the Trump people believed that the abortion issue could be put aside politically by the Dobbs decision—basically that Dobbs would return the issue to states, so it would kind of work itself out. I don’t think a lot of thought has been given on any side to those who are suddenly—those extreme pro-lifers with a bit of mental derangement—find the current situation intolerable. They got their anti-Roe victory, but now they’re seeing abortion rights enshrined in states like Iowa and Missouri, which are facing ballot initiatives to reverse them. But abortion rights do seem enshrined in much of the country. There’s no appetite from the president for having a nationwide ban. He’s mercurial, so you never know. So I think the idea that post-Roe would lead to deranged right-to-life killers was not on everyone’s mind at the end of June 2022, but now we’ve seen a clinic bombing in Florida. We’ve seen this. There have been some other acts of violence and I think that is very similar.

Paul Glastris: I agree with everything Matt said. I’m just not sure the guy’s deranged. I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about him. There’s no hint that he has much of a social media footprint. He’s married, he’s got kids. He is an entrepreneur who works in funeral homes. He’s 57 years old. When we talk about deranged, it’s often people in their 20s with early onset schizophrenia.

Matthew Cooper: Right. By deranged, I didn’t mean signs of schizophrenia, but just more the kind of screw loose that makes you think this is a good way to spend a Saturday.

Paul Glastris: Yeah, I don’t—we can define it as screw loose or we can define it as cold, hard calculation that this is how I can best help the world. Sick behavior, horrible behavior. But I thought that’s very insightful, Matt, that this is maybe bubbling up, not exactly in a partisan way, but out of the hardcore anti-abortion movement. Minnesota is on the other side of that. Their laws are pro-choice. So we will see. We don’t know a lot about this guy, but that sounds right.

Anne Kim: Bill, one thing to note here, I’m sure you’re on top of this, but the judicial branch has asked for a 10% increase in their budget in the big beautiful bill, a lot of it for security. They wanted a 20% increase in funding for court security in part because of this deluge of threats coming their way. And Matt, I do want to push back a little bit on the straight line point between politicians, what they say and threats of violence, because there has been an exponential rise in threats of violence against judges, in part probably precipitated by Trump’s attacks on judges on Truth Social as he’s facing failure in the courts.

Matthew Cooper: I agree, I agree with that. I really just, in this case—but yes, I think the judges, no question.

Anne Kim: So I guess that is the broader question for you guys: how much political violence can we expect to have happen between now and 2026, now and 2028? And what kind of policy responses would you like to see? Trump put out a kind of desultory statement condemning the violence, but there should be a lot more done, you would think.

Bill Scher: I mean, I don’t know. I’m short on data. So I’m always a little reluctant to draw sweeping conclusions without really looking at numbers. I’ve done articles about mass shootings before. And in recent years, I’ve noted that public mass shooting frequency has gone down, even though people hadn’t necessarily recognized it yet.

So what I’m about to say, I say with some reluctance, I don’t know the exact figures. But it seems to me—there’s been political violence forever. William McKinley was assassinated, James Garfield was assassinated. So it’s not like all of a sudden we have political violence. You’ve always had it. But how is it being directed?

And my gut sense is there is an increase in attacks on sort of quote unquote soft targets, down ballot targets, judges, state reps. Even looking at what’s happening with the recent attacks regarding Middle East politics—attacking two young people outside the Israeli embassy—these are not the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

So is that a real trend where people feel like, “Hey, we had a spate of school shootings where if you were a teenager who had whatever kind of nihilistic impulses, a sense that if I shoot up a school, I’m going to make a mark in some way. I’m going to get immediate attention for this. I’m going to give meaning to my life or the end of my life.” Is there a trend now where people are saying, “Hey, I can find someone who wouldn’t have a security detail and still make national news doing it.” That’s a worrisome trend if that is actually a trend.

Middle East Conflict

Anne Kim: I want to turn now to what’s happening in the Middle East. On Friday, Israel launched a surprise attack against Iran. And the stated goal was to target Iran’s nuclear program. But since then, they’ve been also going after the oil infrastructure as well. They’ve struck more than 250 targets, I think, at this point, decapitated Iran’s military. Iran has struck back. At least 13 civilians now killed in Israel. And all of this was happening just as Trump was supposed to be negotiating with Iran over its nuclear weapons program. And now they’ve canceled scheduled talks.

It seems that the United States seems a little bit paralyzed. Trump is kind of at a loss of what to do. What’s your guys’s read on where this conflict is headed?

Matthew Cooper: I think Trump’s sort of impotence has been laid bare and it’s not entirely owing to Trump. There are limits to American power, but the Russians and the Ukrainians have both kind of blown him off in various ways to his demands, the Iranians and the Israelis have blown off his varying demands and they’re both going at it with each other long after Trump promised that he could bring both conflicts to an end by simply being strong and cutting a deal. Well, obviously that hasn’t happened and he’s proven unable to contain it. Now, maybe no president could have, but he had the audacity to claim that he could. And so here we are. So I’m sort of struck by that on the domestic side.

And I’m not totally surprised that this happened on the Israeli side. The Iranian capacity to respond had been severely weakened through the war in Gaza, the audacious Israeli attacks in Lebanon, including the pager intel surprise, which I think foreshadowed in some ways the Ukrainian attack on Russia and this incredible series of inside Iran attacks that Israel was able to sponsor this time. If Israel was ever going to do this, they had an administration that would not try to shut them down at all, unlike they could in Washington, and they had diminished Iranian capacity. I’m not totally shocked this happened now. That doesn’t make it any less tumultuous or dangerous.

Paul Glastris: It does underscore Israel’s intel capacity. They are hitting all kinds of targets that you can’t hit without on the ground knowledge. And we know Israel’s intel capacity was very questionable when they failed to anticipate and quickly respond to the Hamas attack.

But this is a very strong showing by Israel. And Matt’s right. If you’re going to press for degradation of Iran’s nuclear capacity, doing so after the world monitoring forces have said, “Hey, Iran is lying. It’s actually cranked up. It’s moving closer to a warhead”—that kind of gave the Netanyahu government carte blanche to move now, or at least a reason to move now.

And so what we’re seeing in Israel is more than just degradation of Iran’s military nuclear capabilities. As you mentioned, Anne, they’re going after their oil, they’re going after individuals and pretty openly trying to foment regime change. If that happens, “Katie, bar the door,” we have a new Middle East. That might be a great thing. That might be a horrendous thing because things can always get worse.

Donald Trump is one day telling Israel, “absolutely don’t do this.” And the next day saying to Iran, “see, this is what you get when you don’t deal with me.” And it’s all bluster, at least so far, although there may be a potential for a deal here now that Iran is on the ropes, who knows.

Anne Kim: The big question here at this point is how much the US gets involved and what’s happening on the ground. I fear that DOD is not up to the task. I don’t know if you guys saw this really devastating New York Magazine profile over the weekend of Pete Hegseth. It was titled “Playing Secretary.” And it really portrayed this guy who was obsessed with leaks and the culture war and kind of cosplaying the job. And my favorite quote from this article was, quote, “it was clear from the beginning which parts of the job Hegseth most enjoyed: working out, posting about working out and discussing the imminent removal of trans service members.”

Do you guys think that Hegseth hangs on to his job given the actual prospect of war in several parts of the world?

Matthew Cooper: I don’t think it’ll be war that undoes him, I think it’ll be that parade. If Trump feels like the parade didn’t succeed, I think that’ll be a big strike against Hegseth. I don’t know. If he does have the drinking problem that’s been written about that can certainly limit one’s longevity in this job, but the incompetence is such that the State Department was scrambling yesterday to find a way to re-up the VOA Farsi service to get some Iranian broadcasters back on the air, and they’re running the feed from One America News. Yeah, Hegseth is the apex of incompetence.

Paul Glastris: There’s a lot of incompetence to go around, but yeah. And I hope that he’s gone soon. I think he would have been gone a long time ago had Trump not wanted to look like an idiot for having put him there in the first place. They’ve got to get rid of him. This is extremely dangerous. And it’s not just that he’s an idiot and a vain, vindictive guy with no experience running anything large and what experience he does have running small operations does not inspire confidence because he ran both of them into the ground. It’s that there’s no leadership around him. He’s forced out people he’s brought. He brought with him, as this devastating New York magazine profile explains, he’s now got his wife and personal lawyer—that troika is kind of running the Pentagon now.

And he has no chief of staff. He doesn’t trust any of the uniformed military. And it’s just, I can’t think of a more dangerous moment in my lifetime to have the Pentagon with no effective leadership. And if something goes wrong, I don’t know how we respond.

Bill Scher: And I can’t know the answer to this, but perhaps at some point in history we’ll be able to figure it out. If we had more effective leadership at the Pentagon, as well as the State Department, would there have been a way to dissuade Israel from taking this action? Would there have been a way to substantively explain to them what the consequences would be? Obviously, Israel is feeling very cocky. They’ve snubbed the world wagging its finger at its choices after October 7th and basically have the approach that international laws and norms are irrelevant. They can go well beyond—obviously Israel had every right to defend itself in response to what Hamas did, but they went well beyond that in its response to October 7th. And from their short-term perspective, the government still exists and Hamas has been rolled back. Well, that worked from that short-term perspective. So let’s keep doing it. And that doesn’t account for…

Paul Glastris: And oh, by the way, it keeps Netanyahu in power because if he stops the war, any one war, then he faces the voters.

Bill Scher: Right. So, but we’re not seeing a lot of analysis about what happens six months from now, a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. People in this region have long historical memories. And you might degrade missile capacity but you’re going to lead to a wave of asymmetric terrorist activity several years down the line that could affect not just Israel but America as well. I just have no knowledge of what extent this was even thought about or communicated by American officials and how that might differentiate between when Israel had these inclinations and the Obama people were around or the Biden people were around.

Paul Glastris: Yeah, let’s also remember, Barack Obama had Iran in a nuclear weapons treaty that had stopped their advancement. Had Trump not blown that up, we would not be in this position. Conservatives will disagree with that, and they can have at it, but it’s Trump all the way down in the sense that…

Bill Scher: Well, and Trump has essentially tacitly acknowledged this because he wanted to get a deal himself. He thinks it was a good idea to have a deal where Iran’s nuclear energy—where they still got nuclear energy and it was kept from being made into weapons. There was a difference in what Trump wanted. The Obama deal was “Okay, Iran, you can enrich uranium at low levels in Iran, but we have to have rigorous inspections.” And actually, if you go way back to the 2016 campaign, the first time Donald Trump was asked about this, it was by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. Trump’s response was, “I don’t love this deal, but I will police that deal.” That was his initial response. I will police that deal. At heart, he is a deal guy, and not a war guy. He likes the ribbon cutting.

Matthew Cooper: He’s a deal guy. Right, I mean, he’s a terrible negotiator.

Bill Scher: Yeah, but he likes to be there at the ribbon cutting ceremony. So he doesn’t like the idea of presiding over a big multi-year war, which you really can’t control at the end of the day. So he pulls out of the deal in 2018, leads to Iran ramping up its weapons capacity, getting us to this brinkmanship point here. And Trump’s response was, “Okay, I don’t want to do the Obama deal per se. But how about we let you enrich uranium out of country? We’ll do it for you. But you’ll get the energy.” I mean, look, if you could get that deal, I’d take it.

Paul Glastris: But Iran has said no to that.

Matthew Cooper: I mean, look, he is just bad at this in a lot of ways. I recall that before the fall of Afghanistan, he’d invited the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of September 11th to hammer out an accord. He gets swindled at most of these things.

Paul Glastris: Speaking of Obama, Bill had a column on Friday pointing out that Obama did a better job of deporting truly problematic undocumented immigrants with a system that focused on those with serious criminal records and who had only recently come across the border. Trump blew that up and went after people who have been here for decades. It blew up in his face. And it was over the weekend—he said, “My God, there’s all these undocumented workers on farms and in restaurants, and they’ve got families and they’ve been here for years. I don’t wanna go after them.”

So, as if this was a new revelation to him, as if he never thought about it before. We all keep going back to Obama having gotten it right the first time.

The post No Kings, Just Chaos appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Washington Monthly Politics Editor Bill Scher, Executive Editor Matt Cooper and Contributing Editor Anne Kim discuss the recent deployment of the National Guard by Trump in response to protests over immigration raids, the public’s reaction to this escalation of power, and the implications for civil liberties. They also touch on the political fallout from the breakup between Trump and Musk, the challenges facing the reconciliation bill in Congress, and the potential consequences of work requirements in Medicaid.

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Anne Kim:
Good morning everyone, and welcome to the Washington Monthly Politics Livestream. Today is June 9th, 2025. I’m Anne Kim, and I’m joined this morning by politics editor Bill Scher and executive editor for digital Matt Cooper. Good morning, guys.

Bill Scher:
Good morning.

Matthew Cooper:
Morning.

A.K.:
We’re seeing a potentially dangerous escalation of Trump’s exercise of power. He’s deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles over the weekend, and there’s a military parade planned for DC this weekend as well. Just to catch everyone up: Trump deployed about 2,000 National Guard troops to LA in response to protests over immigration raids. Governor Gavin Newsom did not request the mobilization. In fact, he called it “purposely inflammatory” and filed a formal request to withdraw the troops.

The last time a president activated the National Guard without a governor’s request was in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators. This time, we’re seeing the opposite—troops deployed to crack down on peaceful protesters. So guys, what worries you most about what the administration is doing and where it’s headed this week?

M.C.:
Everything. I mean, it’s unnecessary. There’s a reason governors typically request National Guard support—for things like natural disasters or the occasional riot. This is unprecedented. It feels like the administration is trying to escalate rather than deescalate.

Look, this isn’t to excuse anyone committing violence or vandalism during the anti-ICE protests. But as The New York Times said, they’re relishing this conflict. That’s dangerous. It could lead to more deployments and crackdowns on civil liberties.

B.S.:
I don’t disagree. What I want to understand is the public reaction. It’s hard to get a clear read in real time. People are citing pre-existing polling on immigration, but that’s a tricky business—opinions swing dramatically depending on how you frame the question.

For example, deporting people with criminal records polls well. But once you get into deporting people who are just here working, support drops fast. The Garcia case, for instance, polled very differently than Trump’s team hoped.

This is a move toward authoritarianism, but whether it sticks depends on how much the public tolerates or welcomes it. If it doesn’t produce results—like improved order or a better immigration system—it may not be easily replicated in the future.

A.K.:
If you were Gavin Newsom or LA Mayor Karen Bass, how would you respond right now?

B.S.:
I think Newsom’s response so far is on point. And maybe this will memory-hole his earlier attempts to sidestep immigration—framing it as an 80/20 issue or trying to focus on the economy instead of Garcia.

You don’t get to opt out of this issue. The Trump administration is putting it front and center in the most horrific ways, and you have to deal with it.

Newsom is suing. He’s saying, “Don’t arrest the four-year-old—arrest me.” He’s being defiant, insisting on the rule of law and respect for the Constitution. That’s about all you can do.

M.C.:
Right. And when Trump officials are threatening to arrest elected officials—like they did with a member of Congress in New Jersey—it’s politically treacherous for the administration. I think it helps Newsom and Bass.

Politically, it’s a sweet spot for Democrats: strong condemnations of vandalism, combined with pushback against federal overreach. That’s a good place to be.

A.K.:
And don’t forget Trump’s threats to withhold federal funding from California. It’s an empty threat. California is a major donor state—it sends $83 billion more to the federal government than it gets back. Newsom even threatened not to send income taxes to the federal government. I’m not sure how he could do that, but it makes a point: the nation needs California more than the other way around.

M.C.:
Of course.

B.S.:
These threats don’t produce good policy outcomes. They just keep the culture war going. That might be enough to feed the MAGA base, which loves a fight for fight’s sake.

But most Americans want stability. They don’t want to live in a state of constant disruption. Even if some think, “Let Trump be tough and get things done,” if the result is more chaos, it won’t hold.

And Trump doesn’t care—he’s focused on the short term. But for the Republican Party long-term? I’m skeptical this is sustainable.

M.C.:
Yeah, and the more they use the threat of cutting off funding, the less effective it becomes. It just leads to chaos—in the courts, in the streets, on campuses. These things get litigated forever. Diminishing returns, if you ask me.

A.K.:
Right.

B.S.:
One thing I want to add—this is also about a shift in Trump’s immigration strategy. They’re targeting workplaces now, not just “criminals.” Even an anti-immigration source in The New York Times noted: going after criminals takes more staffing, more resources.

But if you raid a workplace, you get big numbers fast. You get TV cameras. You can show off your “progress.” The downside? You’re hitting the economy—locally and nationally.

A.K.:
Right. Agriculture, construction, hospitality—double-digit shares of workers in those industries are immigrants, many undocumented.

M.C.:
Exactly. And if you want the kind of deportation numbers Trump and Tom Homan are talking about, you’d have to go after workers in red states too. That would cause real economic and political damage.

There was that Times story last week—about a small Missouri town where a beloved waitress, Carol, was detained during her regular ICE check-in. She’d lived there for decades, had kids. The town voted for Trump—but they were aghast. “We wanted criminals locked up, not Carol.” I think we’ll see more of that.

A.K.:
Let me ask you both a journalism question. Coverage of LA has focused heavily on burning Waymo cars—great video, sure. But friends in LA say the coverage is totally misrepresenting what’s really happening. That kind of sensationalism plays into Trump’s hands.

So what’s your recommendation for journalists? How do we stay fair and alive to the facts without giving cover for authoritarian crackdowns?

M.C.:
You have to tell the truth and provide context. If violence is confined to a few blocks around Parker Center, say that. LA is 500+ square miles. The Southland even more. Don’t make it sound like the city is in lockdown.

I covered the 1992 riots. They were widespread—but even then, the media exaggerated their reach. Now? It doesn’t seem nearly as bad. But of course, TV’s going to show the burning car, not the peaceful block in Echo Park.

B.S.:
And each ideological side benefits from sensationalism. The right wants to highlight the violence; the left wants to highlight the authoritarianism. Everyone wants this to be seen as a five-alarm fire.

And the media has no incentive to dial it down—outrage drives clicks and views.

M.C.:
Right. I hate to say it, but it makes you nostalgic for Trump’s first term. Back then, they were at least pointing the finger at Antifa. This time, it’s the democratically elected governor of the most populous state.

A.K.:
And this is legally significant. The executive order cites 10 USC §12406—allowing federal deployment of the Guard in case of a rebellion. But it also says the troops are there to “protect federal functions,” which scholars say looks like domestic law enforcement—banned under the Posse Comitatus Act.

That act, passed in 1878, bars federal troops from civilian law enforcement unless expressly allowed. So this whole thing is on very shaky legal ground.

M.C.:
Exactly. Posse Comitatus may have had problematic origins, but it evolved into a bipartisan norm: the military stays out of domestic law enforcement. We don’t do tanks in the streets.

A.K.:
And yet we’re getting just that.

B.S.:
Right. I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect Newsom’s lawsuit will make exactly that argument. And it may put the conservative Supreme Court in a bind.

They’ve shown sympathy for the unitary executive theory—but I don’t think they want to open the door to unrestrained military deployment on U.S. soil. Whatever they decide here could come back to bite them under a future Democratic president.

A.K.:
This will definitely be one to watch. Meanwhile, the situation in L.A. managed to eclipse another big story last week: the Trump–Musk breakup. There’s been endless commentary, but I’m curious—who do you think wins this cage match, and why?

B.S.:
A lot of pundits say Trump’s going to win—Musk doesn’t have Trump’s base or influence in the party. That’s mostly true.

But it depends on what Musk actually does. If he spends big on ads attacking the “One Big Beautiful Bill” as a budget buster, he could shift the conversation. He doesn’t need to flip the whole GOP—just enough Republicans to tank the bill.

And it doesn’t have to be personal. He can just fan the flames and make it about the debt. If his endgame is killing the bill, he has a real opening.

M.C.:
Yeah, and that could embolden the Freedom Caucus folks who caved the first time but might stand firm during conference.

That said, I still don’t totally understand this feud. Is it real? Is it ketamine-fueled? Is it about Tesla stock?

They’ve always been a weird pair. It wouldn’t surprise me if they patch things up like a dysfunctional couple that can’t quit each other.

A.K.:
Which brings us to reconciliation—your favorite topic, B.S. Where do things stand this week?

B.S.:
The House barely passed its version. The Senate hasn’t taken it up, and there’s pushback from all sides.

Far-right senators like Ron Johnson are saying it still spends too much and want to roll back to pre-pandemic levels—which would mean deep cuts, especially after inflation. Others don’t like the SALT cap expansion, which was designed to appease blue-state Republicans but costs revenue.

Meanwhile, some red-state Republicans actually like the clean energy tax credits because they bring in jobs. But the House bill phases those out fast to satisfy the Freedom Caucus.

Now the caucus is warning: if the Senate messes with SALT or the credits, the deal’s off.

The Trump administration wants this done by July 4, but there’s no Senate text yet. And then there’s the looming debt ceiling—Trump says he wants to abolish it entirely.

A.K.:
Right, and he even agrees with Elizabeth Warren on that.

B.S.:
Exactly—and I’ve written the same. It’s a dumb mechanism. But Republicans don’t think they can get rid of it with bipartisan support, so they’re trying to do it through reconciliation.

We don’t have a precise deadline yet, but most think August is when the crisis hits. So July 4 is more political theater than anything. We need to see some actual text soon. This bill is still very much in limbo.

A.K.:
Do you think the messaging around Medicaid work requirements—that it ensures benefits only go to the “deserving”—is actually working?

B.S.:
Hard to say. There’s so much noise, it’s tough for any single message to stick.

Democrats are hammering that this bill could knock 8 to 12 million people off health insurance—between Medicaid work rules and ending ACA subsidies.

Republicans argue that those people “shouldn’t” be getting coverage in the first place. But that’s a tough sell in swing districts. When real people show up at town halls and say, “I lost coverage because of you,” that’s not abstract—it’s personal.

M.C.:
Right, and as you pointed out in your video, A.K., these work requirements have already been tried in states—and failed. They’re hard to document and easy to mess up.

Most Medicaid recipients are already working. This is about paperwork, not work.

A.K.:
Exactly. Senator Warnock called it a “paperwork requirement,” not a work requirement. The idea is to overwhelm people with bureaucracy until they drop off—or get kicked off for some technicality.

That’s what happened after the 1996 welfare reform. The number of people on aid dropped, but poverty didn’t.

M.C.:
Right. And unlike welfare, health insurance doesn’t lend itself to the same “work incentive” logic. People need coverage whether they’re working or not. This isn’t a population loafing around for benefits—they’re already juggling jobs and instability.

A.K.:
Yeah, and back in the ’90s, Bill Clinton at least paired welfare reform with a big expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit. There was a clearer incentive and a softer landing.

Here, it’s just punitive.

M.C.:
Totally. And post-Obamacare, I think the public has grown more uncomfortable with people getting kicked off insurance. They expect some safety net now.

B.S.:
At least with Clinton-era reforms, there was a genuine effort to improve outcomes. You can debate whether it worked, but the intent wasn’t to punish poor people.

This feels like the goal is to reduce the number of people getting help—period. If you’re a Republican in a swing district, that’s not a stat debate. That’s a constituent standing in front of you, saying, “I used to have coverage. Now I don’t. And it’s your fault.”

M.C.:
And let’s not forget: big employers like Walmart rely on Medicaid to help cover their workers. They don’t want more churn and chaos. Their workforce is unstable enough as it is.

A.K.:
Exactly. So, final question. With everything happening, what’s the one thing you’ll be watching most closely this week?

M.C.:
I’m always watching the bond markets. Borrowing costs are rising, and that’s going to have ripple effects on reconciliation and the broader economy. Trump’s backed off some of his tariff threats, which helped. But that could change fast.

B.S.:
Reconciliation is my main focus, but I’m also keeping an eye on the DNC drama.

Over the weekend, audio leaked of Chair Ken Martin criticizing Vice Chair David Hogg for getting involved in primaries through his PAC. That’s a serious conflict—DNC officials aren’t supposed to play favorites.

There’s speculation Hogg leaked the tape himself. Other DNC members are furious, and they’re rallying around Martin.

At a time when Republicans are on the ropes, Democrats don’t need a circular firing squad—especially not over something avoidable like this.

M.C.:
Right. Martin fought hard for that chair position. For him to even suggest he might quit? That’s incredible.

B.S.:
So I’m watching whether pressure builds on Hogg to step down.

A.K.:
As if the Democrats needed more problems.

As for me, I’ll be watching Saturday’s parade—and the protests. Will D.C. become the next L.A.? We’ll find out.

Until next week, take care.

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