How are you “monitoring the situation,” four days into the joint US-Israeli offensive against Iran? Our Commander-in-Chief has adopted an unorthodox approach: evading the press in person as the strikes and counterstrikes fall, while taking phone calls from basically any journalist with his personal number.
By Cockburn’s count, President Trump has given at least 20 “exclusive” telephone interviews to reporters since the early hours of Saturday morning. Old habits die hard. The starting gun was fired by the Washington Post’s Natalie Allison and Tara Copp at 4 a.m., three hours after the bombs started to hit. “All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump told them. Since then, he’s offered a variety of other reasons for US involvement. The strikes were “a great thing for our country,” Trump told MS NOW’s Mychael Schnell and Laura Barrón-López late Saturday. “MAGA loves what I’m doing – every aspect of it,” he said to Rachael Bade yesterday.
Trump has also taken calls from: ABC (twice), the Atlantic, Axios, Israel’s Channel 14, CNBC, CNN, the Daily Mail, the Daily Wire, Fox News (twice), the New York Times, News Nation, Politico, the Sun, the Telegraph and the Washington Reporter (three times).
This is, clearly, an unusual conflict. It was announced on Truth Social. Some MAGA influencers are doing a better job of evacuating US citizens from the Gulf than the State Department is; others are loudly questioning why America is involved in the first place. The country deserves clarity – and the ostensibly serious Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Speaker Mike Johnson only muddied the waters with their answers last night. Perhaps the next minute-long “exclusive” phone call with POTUS will clear things up…
Disrespected by your elders
Trump’s hopefully-not-forever war in Iran has garnered criticism as well as consternation. Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Joyce Carol Oates, 87, offered the following broadside:
speaking as glibly as Beavis & Butthead. does T***p even grasp the profound significance of what he has set in motion in the Middle East? this person whose most essential self is riding in a golf cart fatly, cheating at the profoundly insignificant game of leisure golf when he assumes no one is looking.
On our radar
K-PAX Texan scandal-magnet Ken Paxton faces off against incumbent Senator John Cornyn and Representative Wesley Hunt in today’s US Senate primary in the Lone Star State.
WHAT POPULISM? Only 27 percent of Americans approved of the US-Israeli bombing of Tehran, according to a Reuters poll conducted prior to the deaths of six US servicemembers.
STRAIGHT FLUSH The District of Columbia lifted an advisory telling residents to avoid the Potomac River yesterday, after a collapsed pipe allowed 240 million gallons of sewage to leak into the waterway over the course of six weeks.
Slick Willie on tape
Video footage of Bill Clinton’s Jeffrey Epstein deposition to Congress has just been released. As ever, the former president seemed to be watching his own performance with amusement. He had a slightly incredulous half-smile across his face for most of the four hours, and he would often interrupt his own testimony with bouts of chuckling.
Clinton denied that he had been “chummy” with Epstein and claimed that the bulk of their conversations took the form of the financier quizzing him about “economics and politics.” Clinton said that he had agreed to accept Epstein’s patronage because he was looking for ways to get the Clinton Global Initiative off the ground and thought that he could help. He ended up making a curiously utilitarian sort of case: was it so bad for him to associate with Epstein if by doing so he could help people in Africa who were “dying like flies” from AIDS?
He also seemed to go out of his way to exonerate Trump. “The President never… never said anything to me to make me think he was involved… He just didn’t.”
At times it seemed like his questioners – various members of the House Oversight Committee – were more concerned with litigating past indiscretions of this notoriously slippery character. “Why was there a painting of you wearing Monica Lewinsky’s famous blue dress in Epstein’s New York townhouse,” asked Representative Anna Paulina Luna? “Why would someone paint that?” “Objection, that’s speculative, ask the artist,” Clinton’s attorney cut in. The former president smiled again, revealing nothing.
Comments