President Trump suggested he might back eventual sanctions relief for Iran “if they can be peaceful,” combining threats and the prospect of diplomacy after US strikes aimed at destroying Iranian nuclear sites, Bloomberg reports.
Said Trump: “We have the sanctions on. And if they do a job, and if they can be peaceful, and if they can show us they’re not going to do any more harm, I would take the sanctions off.”
The CBO estimates that the Republican reconciliation bill that the Senate is considering will increase the deficit by nearly $3.3 trillion between 2025 to 2034, Bloomberg reports.
Punchbowl News says Senate Republicans and the White House reject the CBO estimate as inaccurate. The White House estimates it will cut the deficit by $4.9 trillion over the next decade.
“Iran could start producing enriched uranium again ‘in a matter of months’, the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog said, adding there is no military solution to stop Iran from a nuclear weapon,” the Financial Times reports.
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Politico: “Paul, Weiss wasn’t the first firm to be the focus of such an executive order, but it would go on to be the first to negotiate a deal with the White House in order to get it lifted. At the time, the firm’s leader Brad Karp said he was trying to save his team from an ‘existential crisis.’”
“Since then, the firm has endured. But the decision to strike a deal has led to high-profile departures among partners and drawn condemnation from Democrats and others in the legal community.”
“After Karp made a deal with Trump, at least 10 partners in the litigation department have resigned from the firm, including several with close ties to Democrats. A group of the departing partners have joined together to start their own firm where they will continue to represent tech giants like Meta and Google, and another has jumped ship to one of the four firms that chose to fight the administration in court.”
Russia launched the most extensive aerial bombardment of Ukraine since its full-scale invasion, signalling a sharp escalation in Moscow’s campaign and further undermining fragile hopes for a negotiated end to the war, the Financial Times reports.
“Low-income Americans would lose health coverage and government food assistance on an unprecedented scale under the giant Republican policy bill,“ the New York Times reports.
“But to hear President Trump and Republican lawmakers describe the bill as it nears a vote in the Senate, it cuts no benefits at all.”
Said Trump: “We’re cutting $1.7 trillion in this bill, and you’re not going to feel any of it.”
“That claim rests on a maneuver embedded throughout the sprawling legislation: Instead of explicitly reducing benefits, Republicans would make them harder to get and to keep. The effect, analysts say, is the same, with millions fewer Americans receiving assistance. By including dozens of changes to dates, deadlines, document requirements and rules, Republicans have turned paperwork into one of the bill’s crucial policy-making tools, yielding hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to help offset their signature tax cuts.”
“After a brief interlude, Elon Musk on Saturday resumed his public wrestling match with President Donald Trump, ripping into the president’s domestic policy bill as ‘utterly insane and destructive’ just as the Senate met to vote on a key procedural step to pass the ‘big beautiful bill,’” Mother Jones reports.
Wrote Musk, on X: “The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!”
In a later post, Musk warned that the bill would be “political suicide” for the Republican Party.
President Trump lashed out at Israeli prosecutors over the corruption trial facing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that the United States having given billions in aid to Israel is “not going to stand for this,” USA Today reports.
Netanyahu thanked Trump in a post on X.
New York Times: “It was still not clear whether GOP leaders had enough support to pass the measure and send it to the House for final approval in time to meet the July 4 deadline Mr. Trump has set. Democrats demanded a line-by-line reading of the bill, a procedural protest that was expected to take more than a dozen hours and likely push any final action in the Senate into Monday at the earliest.”
“But the test vote on Saturday night put the measure on track, even as it reflected the considerable angst among Republicans about their party’s signature bill.”
Washington Post: Senate Republicans vote to take up Trump’s tax bill, overcoming resistance in their ranks.
New York Times: “During his first term, Mr. Trump told Kristi Noem — then a U.S. representative from South Dakota, now Mr. Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security — that his “dream” was to be on Mount Rushmore. She later gave Mr. Trump a model of Mount Rushmore with his face on it.”
“The idea has resurfaced since Mr. Trump returned to office. A congresswoman from Florida sponsored a bill in January to ‘direct the Secretary of the Interior to arrange for the carving of the figure of President Donald Trump on Mount Rushmore National Memorial.’ It was referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources, which has yet to act on it.”
Wall Street Journal: “Europe, once home to Louis Pasteur and Albert Einstein, for centuries led the world in discoveries that explained the natural world. The U.S. took the lead after World War II, as European émigrés went to work alongside Americans in university labs flush with federal funding.”
“The U.S. still outspends any other country on research and development. But since returning to office, the Trump administration has cut or frozen billions of dollars of government research grants to universities, citing investigations into diversity programs and antisemitism.”
Washington Post: “Across President Donald Trump’s administration, a creeping culture of secrecy is overtaking personnel and budget decisions, casual social interactions, and everything in between, according to interviews with more than 40 employees across two dozen agencies, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. No one wants to put anything in writing anymore, federal workers said: Meetings are conducted in-person behind closed doors, even on anodyne topics. Workers prefer to talk outdoors, as long as the weather cooperates. And communication among colleagues — whether work-related or personal — has increasingly shifted to the encrypted messaging app Signal, with messages set to auto-delete.”
“It’s not just career staffers who are clamming up, fearful they will be tagged as rebellious or resistant to Trump’s policies and dismissed amid the administration’s push to trim the workforce, fulfilling the president’s promise to eradicate waste, fraud and abuse. Trump’s own political appointees are also resistant to writing things down, worried that their agency’s deliberations will appear in news coverage and inspire a hunt for leakers, federal workers said.”
“Iran said it remains skeptical that a tentative US-brokered ceasefire with Israel would last, warning it’s prepared to respond to any fresh aggression,” Bloomberg reports.
“The GOP-controlled Senate voted Saturday to advance President Trump’s tax and spending megabill despite some Republican defections, narrowly clearing one hurdle but offering a stark preview of the difficulties party leaders face in getting the measure passed into law,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told Democratic senators Saturday that he will force the clerks to read the 1,000-page Republican megabill on the Senate floor once Republicans vote to proceed to the legislation, a procedural act of defiance that will take an estimated 12 hours and delay final passage of President Trump’s agenda by half a day — at least, The Hill reports.
Wall Street Journal: “Security forces emerge from hiding to set up checkpoints, hunt for moles and tell residents to watch their neighbors for spies.”
“Jim McLaughlin, one of President Donald Trump’s top pollsters, said Hill Republicans should nix Senate Republicans’ deeper Medicaid cuts in the megabill or risk deep backlash from voters,” Politico reports.
“The Supreme Court’s nine justices often like to tout their camaraderie, hoping to dispel public perceptions that they are locked into warring ideological camps,” Politico reports.
“But the final rulings of the current term — issued from the bench during a tense 90-minute court session Friday — revealed some acrimonious, even acidic, exchanges.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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