The Trump White House keeps losing
The Trump White House keeps losing
President Donald Trump’s second term began at a breakneck pace, with a wave of executive orders and other actions imposing tariffs; targeting law firms, universities, and individuals he believed had wronged him while he was out of office; and reshaping the US immigration system.
Nearly a year and a half into his second term, the White House appears to be losing momentum. Much of Trump’s legislative agenda has stalled in Congress, the war with Iran has dragged on longer than the administration seems to have expected, and Trump’s proposed “anti-weaponization” fund” went down in flames after some unusual pushback from Republican lawmakers.
To understand the current state of the Trump White House, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Megan Messerly, a White House reporter at Politico, who recently wrote about the “funk” Trump and his staff are in.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You recently wrote for Politico about how the president and his administration are kind of in a funk — and not just over the slush fund fiasco. Remind us how else we’re seeing this funk, for those who have disassociated.
We are now more than three months into the Iran war, and this is just not going anywhere anytime soon. We have seen the president over the last week and a half now say that he’s close on a deal to extend this ceasefire with Iran that still has not come through. There was this two-hour Situation Room meeting on Friday. Nothing came out of that after two hours.
Talking to folks in and around the White House, they just want to find a face-saving way out of this war, but they have been unable to do that. They’ve been unable to get Iran to agree to something that would open the Strait of Hormuz. And in the meantime, everyone’s just very over it.
According to my reporting, that’s including staff inside the White House; one of my sources said that pretty much everyone is in a funk and described it as being stuck in this quicksand of Iran.
Is there a legislative funk too with this administration? Because it doesn’t feel like the Trump administration is getting anything done.
That was one of the big things that I was talking to folks about for this story — this idea that Iran has really taken up so much of the president’s time that it is in some ways distracting from some of these other priorities. And that includes the president’s legislative agenda.
Some allies I spoke with also blamed that squarely on Senate Majority Leader John Thune and said, Thune is being too much of an institutionalist, protecting the filibuster. The president has called for firing the Senate parliamentarian. And so you have a very frustrated Trump, but a frustrated Trump who has rhetorically turned the screws a bit on Thune, but really hasn’t put the full force of pressure on Thune to get his legislative agenda through.
That includes things like the president has talked a lot about this Save America Act, an elections-focus piece of legislation. That’s one of his top legislative priorities. There’s this housing bill that includes this institutional investor ban that he wants to see across the finish line. And then of course he wants to see security funding for his ballroom/bunker.
It feels like [Trump] doesn’t care about the midterms. But then there’s all the gerrymandering that he’s pushing, which implies that he very much cares about the midterms and his endorsement of candidates. What’s your read on what’s going on with the president when it comes to the midterms?
Yes, it definitely feels like those two things are at odds with one another.
I think the way that White House allies view it is the president needs to be able to say, I don’t care about the midterms. I don’t care about high gas prices because that language is for Iran.
He’s saying, I’m willing to take this gamble because he needs Iran to believe that he will take the maximalist position, that he will let gas prices rise however high they need to rise in order to notch a deal. White House allies would say that that’s a negotiating tactic. So what might be helpful rhetorically with Iran is not helpful rhetorically with Republicans as they’re fighting it out in these really key midterm races.
It feels like it’s such a tough spot that even the things that should be easy wins — like a sesquicentennial concert on the National Mall. What is going on with this concert?
What we’re seeing is even some of those folks now pulling out and saying, “Hey, we were interested in sort of celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, but this is far too political for us. This is not what we wanted. This is not what we signed up for.”
And to me, and many of the folks that I spoke with, this is just such a deviation from where we were at the beginning of the president’s term last year when he was just really taking the culture by storm. He was just steamrolling these law firms and Ivy League institutions, and you’ve seen other pop culture figures come on board to the president’s agenda like Nick Minaj.
This is a moment where the president wants to be taking a victory lap and yet he’s stuck in this quagmire that is Iran, one that he desperately wants to get out of.
And Trump even lost his name on the Kennedy Center?
This has been one that has been near and dear to the president for months now — his fight to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center and this planned massive renovation of the center, all put on hold by a federal court last week. We saw the president take to Truth Social to express his sincere displeasure at that decision.
Do they have any wins that they should be celebrating right now that they could be parading in front of the American people?
The White House pushed back on my story and said we do have things that we are doing.
For instance, their efforts to reduce the cost of prescription drugs through TrumpRx and the coming launch of “Trump accounts” for millions of children. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was on the road last week in California and elsewhere touting these investment accounts that are supposed to sort of build generational wealth for the next generation. But that is all getting overshadowed right now by Iran.
But ultimately, I think the challenge, and this is what I hear when I’m talking to regular voters, is, “Okay, these Trump accounts are great, but I’m being crunched right now by the cost of gas, by the cost of my groceries when I’m buying ground beef and it’s $9, $10 a pound.”
So these wins are great, but when the pressing concern is putting food on the table and making ends meet and paying the bills, that has been cold comfort and that sort of exposes some of the challenge of the White House’s efforts to message here.
Do you think watching some half-naked men brutally beat the living daylights out of each other on the South Lawn will make the president feel better — and on his birthday, no less?
The president is a longtime fan of the [Ultimate Fighting Championship] and we are certainly seeing him celebrate his 80th birthday, which is the day of the UFC fight. In accordance with that, the president is sort of this mercurial figure and something like that really could raise his mood and honestly produce a policy breakthrough, because he has been stuck for so long.
Talking to allies, I think they think that if the president gets a win, that could sort of put them back on track to passing the president’s agenda. And that could be a policy win or it could just be a triumphant UFC fight on the White House lawn.
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