A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama.
And that was just yesterday.
For President Trump, things aren’t going great. He normally thrives in chaos, reveling in unpredictability to keep his opponents off-balance. But right now, he’s just flailing. Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing how to control the national conversation and quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country’s standing in the world. Trump’s poll numbers have plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout. Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to defy their president. Trump, whose political image revolves around strength, finds himself diminished.
At this time roughly a year ago, Trump had overwhelmed Washington. He had slashed taxes, launched trade wars, angered longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and eviscerated the federal government. The Democrats struggled to slow him down; Trump, meanwhile, openly mused about defying the Constitution to run for a third presidential term in 2028. On July Fourth, he punctuated the frenzy by signing a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation—which he dubbed, in typical Trumpian fashion, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—at an outdoor White House ceremony complete with a flyover by the B-2 bomber that had just clobbered Iran’s nuclear facilities.
But as this Independence Day approaches—as the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial—Trump is unable to control the political narrative about a war that did not go the way he had hoped. A memorandum of understanding signed last week extended a shaky cease-fire and led to an initial round of negotiations involving Vice President Vance. A host of issues remains, including the fate of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations could take many months.
This is not something that Trump wants to hear. He’s been bored of this war for a while, and in the West Wing, there was a race to be done with it. Allies have told us there are also quiet, behind-closed-doors doubts: What, exactly, did the conflict accomplish? Few, if any, of the president’s goals were achieved. Iran could close the strait again. Yet Trump has frantically tried to spin this as a victory, even as he walks away from some of his stated objections. He has taken to Truth Social repeatedly this week to defend the deal and once again seethe about comparisons with the agreement that Obama struck more than a decade ago. Trump continued to waffle as to what could come next—even suggesting a resumption of the bombing campaign if Iran does not comply, a threat that few take seriously. His attempts at unpredictably were quite predictable, and Iran has proved itself to be anything but cowed.
Still, many in Trump’s orbit tell us that they believe the war won’t have much political staying power. Their focus, at least for now, is not the long-term ramifications on the Middle East or America’s international relationships, but rather the political moment ahead of the midterms. They hope that the war will be soon forgotten—that the strait will reopen, that the price of gas will fall, that bombs will not need to fall again. Aides pointed us to a number of major events, including a series of Supreme Court decisions and even the World Cup, that could eclipse the war in the national consciousness. “The midterms are months away,” one official told us. “We’ll have lots of plot twists by then.”
But so far, Trump’s efforts aren’t working. And when his frustrations exploded yesterday, he lashed out against senators who have faithfully served him—and whose support he can’t afford to lose.
Tensions between Trump and Senate Republicans have been building for months. The president irked party leaders by endorsing a primary opponent to Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who lost his bid for a third term. Trump then infuriated them by snubbing Senator John Cornyn of Texas in favor of his scandal-plagued primary challenger, state Attorney General Ken Paxton—a move that appeared to seal Cornyn’s doom in last month’s primary runoff. Senate Majority Leader John Thune had strongly backed Cornyn, a former member of the Senate GOP leadership, and the party’s campaign arm had spent millions of dollars to boost his candidacy before Trump undercut them.
Senate Republicans gave Trump much of what he wanted last year, but he now faces some resistance as the GOP’s prospects in this year’s midterms worsen. Egged on by loyalists such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Trump has tried to jawbone Republicans into scrapping or circumventing the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to pass legislation known as the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. (It would also, in some versions, significantly curtail voting by mail.) Republicans have never had a majority that supports eliminating the filibuster, and Trump’s refusal to accept that reality has frustrated senators.
On top of all that, Trump’s efforts to force members of his own party into retirement have created what’s become known as the “YOLO Caucus” in the Senate, as Republicans such as Cassidy, Cornyn, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina (who announced his retirement immediately after declaring his opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year) have felt liberated to oppose and criticize the president in ways they would not have if they faced reelection. Tillis, in particular, has trashed some of Trump’s ideas and appointees with a newfound zeal—he called Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, “an incompetent sycophant.” And Cassidy decried the administration’s deal with Iran as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”
[Read: A serious debate about an unserious bill]
The intraparty feud came to a head yesterday, when Trump abruptly canceled a ceremony to sign a major housing bill—a rare example of significant bipartisan legislation—and demanded that Republicans first pass the partisan SAVE America Act if they wanted his approval. Things devolved from there. During a meeting with Senate Republicans in the Capitol, Trump berated them for allowing (through a combination of defections and absences) the passage of a resolution seeking to constrain his ability to wage war on Iran. Cassidy confronted him over the deal he had struck, and the two got into a loud argument in which Trump at one point reportedly told the senator to sit down. “I make no apologies for standing up to the president,” Cassidy told reporters afterward. “I am sticking up for the American people, even if I’m speaking to the president.”
Naturally, Trump proclaimed the whole thing a success anyway. “We had a really great meeting,” he told reporters. “We like our leader. We like our party. We like, really, everybody in the room—I don’t like a few people, but that’s okay.” The president was flanked by three of his loyalists: Senators Rick Scott of Florida, John Barrasso of Wyoming, and Lee, all of whom wore a Trump-style red tie. Thune stood to the side, his blue tie appearing—intentionally or not—like a small declaration of independence. By nightfall, the friction between Trump and Senate Republicans seemed to ease a bit—at least for the moment. The chamber took a symbolic revote of the war-powers resolution and defeated it. Two Republicans flipped their votes; one of them was Cassidy. White House officials pointed to that as a sign of Trump’s continued hold on the GOP.
When we reached out to the White House for comment, the spokesperson Taylor Rogers responded with a list of the president’s accomplishments and added: “President Trump is the leader of the free world, and thanks to his bold leadership, the United States of America has never been stronger.”
In the face of these struggles, Trump has continued to try to create his own reality. He returned to the White House from the Hill for a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Yet even as Rutte lavished him with praise, Trump took the moment to attack some of NATO’s key members for not helping with the Iran war, and he unleashed particular bile on Italy as part of a diplomatic spat that began when the president claimed that its prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, had “begged” him for a photo at the G7 summit last week. Meloni denied that, which infuriated Trump.
But Trump was far angrier about something closer to home. As part of his expansive effort to remake Washington in his own image, he took on a project to fix up the Reflecting Pool. What he got instead was an on-the-nose metaphor for the state of his presidency: a no-bid contract to a crony that went over budget, ended in failure, and resulted in the pool being policed by federal troops. The pool’s liner has come apart, and the water has turned a brilliant, stubborn green—far from the “American-flag blue” that Trump intended. But rather than take responsibility, Trump has veered into conspiracy theories.
[Read: What color is the Reflecting Pool? An investigation.]
He has, predictably, turned America’s birthday into a commemoration of himself. Plans for a concert on the National Mall to kick off the festivities turned into a pro-Trump rally, and most of the music acts backed out once they realized how partisan the event had become. Trump went ahead anyway, making himself last night’s centerpiece with a few C-listers as his opening acts. But his heart didn’t seem in it as he delivered a short speech that included some nods to the republic’s founding and plenty of grievances. He spoke from behind bulletproof glass, and the crowd was small by Trump’s standards. Social-media footage showed many people leaving while he was still speaking.
Trump, ever attuned to what is trending, posted on social media today that he had a massive crowd and that “everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech.” He did not weigh in on the day’s breaking news from the Middle East: Despite the cease-fire agreement, Iran fired upon a vessel trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz, which underscored the challenges that lay ahead in negotiations. Try as he might, Trump can’t change the subject.
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