“President Trump’s prime-time speech last Thursday was intended to shore up his tenacious lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him and leaned heavily on recycled claims that the Chinese government tried to tip the scales against him,” the New York Times reports.
“But a trove of intelligence documents that Mr. Trump declassified in hopes that they would bolster his assertions arguably made a stronger case that a different country — Russia — had meddled in the race.”
“The Trump administration sought the phone records of several New York Times journalists and their relatives — including one reporter’s mother — in its effort to unmask the confidential sources who had provided information for articles about the security capabilities of President Trump’s new Air Force One jet,” the New York Times reports.
Washington Post: “Outside of the president’s list of frequently dialed contacts and the clips assembled of White House-aligned influencers praising his speech, the prime-time address failed to galvanize conservatives, with some publicly questioning his focus on 2020 as the midterms approach. Republicans fighting to maintain congressional control this fall largely sidestepped the message.”
”By the weekend, the White House-aligned commentators and members of Congress who had pushed the Trump team’s talking points about the speech had seemingly moved on. The muted response underscored a broader political reality: Many Republicans facing voters this fall have shown little interest in making Trump’s renewed focus on the 2020 election central to their campaigns as they head into a midterm complicated by the president’s weak standing with independent voters.”
“One of Donald Trump’s most grandiose vanity projects, a multimillion-dollar makeover of Florida’s Palm Beach international airport into a self-aggrandizing, gold-plated transportation hub, is running into turbulence, barely a week after the first plane’s wheels touched the runway,” The Guardian reports.
“At first glance, the rebranding of the airport less than 5 miles from his opulent Mar-a-Lago resort appears to be complete. Its website bears the name and oversized logo of the President Donald J Trump international airport, and state transportation workers were quick to erect highway signs leaving drivers in no doubt where they were heading.”
“Yet inside the terminals, at the ticket counters and baggage halls, the change is far less noticeable. Digital signage reflects the switch, but many physical signs and infrastructure still refer to its old name of Palm Beach International (PBI).”
Anne Applebaum: “When Donald Trump first appeared in U.S. politics, Graham recognized him immediately for what he was: the spokesman for an alien ideology, one radically different from the idealistic patriotism that Graham had practiced and preached since childhood. Trump privately mocked the military that Graham loved as nothing but ‘suckers and losers.’ He put falsehoods, cynicism, and personal greed at the center of his politics, while expressing disdain for transparency, accountability, and democracy itself. In 2015, Graham described Trump as a ‘race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot’ who should ‘go to hell.’ Also as a ‘nutjob.'”
“When Trump won, Graham understood, as did so many others, that he would have to make some important choices. For a while, he went silent. In the spring of 2016, I saw him at one of those conferences in Europe. He seemed too depressed to speak.”
“But then, like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experienced radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator.”
“Last summer, as many one-time adversaries of President Trump sought to bury the hatchet with him, he met with someone who seemed like a intractable enemy: his former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump had a brief yet significant conversation at the president’s private, members-only golf club in Bedminster, N.J. breaking a yearslong estrangement marked by legal disputes and public acrimony.”
“Their conversation, which has not been previously reported, provided Mr. Cohen a toehold into Mr. Trump’s orbit and set in motion a broader effort to make peace with the president.”
“President Donald Trump marked the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding on July Fourth with a speech touting a roaring stock market, urging election reforms, and hailing military interventions in Venezuela and Iran,” CNN reports.
“But another anniversary went conspicuously unmarked: the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by Trump exactly one year earlier.”
Reason: “At its heart, the otherwise complicated and multi-stage Teapot Dome affair of the 1920s, which until Watergate was considered the greatest federal government scandal of all time, was about secret bribes to an administration official that lubricated lucrative regulatory outcomes.”
“In 1921, Interior Secretary Albert Fall clandestinely accepted $404,000 ($7.6 million in today’s money) in cash and no-interest loans from two oil executives, who then became recipients of no-bid leases to exploit oil fields in California’s Elk Hills and Wyoming’s Teapot Dome. As part of the scheme, Fall had previously convinced the secretary of the Navy to transfer authority over those lands to the Department of the Interior. The no-bid contracts were legal (at the time, anyway); the bribes were not, and the secrecy exploded upon revelation.”
“Fast forward a century. Four days before Trump’s second inauguration, a company called Aryam Investments 1 signed a deal with the president-elect’s son Eric to buy a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial for a reported $500 million, half of it in cash up front. The Trump family received $187 million overnight, and the family of World Liberty Financial co-founder Steve Witkoff, who by then was already conducting sensitive Middle East diplomacy on behalf of the incoming president, received an additional $31 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Amazingly, the transaction was made in secret, revealed only one year later.”
“The world’s modern populists are discovering a common trait that seems to serve them more than the voters they claim to champion,” CNN reports.
“When scandal strikes, it’s just fresh evidence of their self-fulfilling prophecy that a shady cabal of ‘deep state’ elites bent on suppressing democracy is out to get them.”
“On both sides of the Atlantic this week, politicians seemed to ask themselves WWTD: What would Trump do?”
Futurism: “Donald Trump is now the first president to have an airport named after him while still in office. And what better way to commemorate this high honor than with lazy AI slop?”
“Until a few days ago, the Palm Beach International Airport in South Florida was still called the Palm Beach International Airport. Now it’s the President Donald J. Trump International Airport, after a law that his pal and governor of Florida Ron DeSantis signed back in March took effect. Its old logo looked like a riff on Disney’s. Its new one, first revealed by Eric Trump in May, is clearly meant to be a transmogrified Great Seal, rendered — of course — in Trump’s favorite color: gold.”
“Look past its gaudiness, though, and you’ll notice some things that’re a little off in the finer details.”
John Gruber: “The fourth star is crooked. What a mess. Perfect logo for Trump Airport.‘
“Palm Beach International Airport in Florida was formally rechristened President Donald J. Trump International Airport Thursday morning — with the commander in chief’s own Boeing 757 making the first landing,” the New York Post reports.
“Anyone who doesn’t love America is a traitor and beneath contempt. Those who don’t love America, those who are disloyal should be exiled immediately.”
— Elon Musk, on X.
Bloomberg: “The last week has underscored how much Donald Trump has changed the presidency. The next question is how permanent those shifts will be.”
“It’s an especially challenging dilemma for Democrats.”
“While Republicans have cheered on Trump and the Supreme Court has often granted its blessing, his opponents have warned of democracy-damaging consequences of his power plays.”
“But if Democrats win power in 2028, they’ll have to decide between returning to old restraints, or asserting the same authority for their own causes.”
“President Trump on Wednesday achieved his long-awaited ambition of flying on a new Air Force One, thanks to the Qatari government. But his plans for the aircraft’s future might prove much more difficult to get off the ground,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Trump wants the Boeing 747 jumbo jet to eventually form the centerpiece of his planned presidential library in downtown Miami, similar to Ronald Reagan’s library complex in California that also includes a former Air Force One. He faces numerous obstacles, however, from future presidents who might need to use the jet, Democratic politicians who are determined to stop him and the logistical challenges of cramming the hulking jumbo jet into his planned skyscraper in the middle of a dense city.”
“I don’t even think it’s disputable. I mean, if he had won that election he would’ve been hobbled. He was already pretty unpopular. Covid was raging, inflation was raging. Instead, Biden was the one who ate all of those conditions.”
— Regime Change author Jonathan Swan, on NBC News, on whether losing the 2020 election was the best thing to ever happen to Donald Trump.
“The 250th anniversary of America’s liberation from a king kicked off with a campaign-style rally on the National Mall by President Donald Trump, whose face already stares down from banners fluttering from federal buildings across the nation’s capital,” the Associated Press reports.
“The images illustrate how the Republican president has dominated daily life since returning to power and, to some, evoke more the style of a monarch than the leader of the world’s oldest democracy. But it’s also how he has wielded that power that has led to comparisons of an imperial reign.”
“A federal financial agency has begun investigating Polymarket, reigniting longstanding questions about whether a leading prediction market company tied to Donald Trump Jr. is operating within the law,” the New York Times reports.
“President Donald Trump unveiled a new rendering of a special commemorative US passport bearing his likeness Friday, debuting a limited-edition passport to mark America’s 250th anniversary this year,” CNN reports.
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.
“There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them.”
— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
“Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all.”
— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
“Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
“The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom — nicely packaged, constantly updated… What political junkie could ask for more?”
— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.