Does the Art of the Deal Play in Iran? Jasmine Crockett: I’d Stab Him Too. Karmelo’s Mom’s GoFundMe Page. George Will on Graham Platner’s ‘Journey.’ Inflation. Crowded GOP Field for 2028?
The shooting between the U.S. and Iran has resumed, but on a limited basis. Here’s this morning’s CBS headline: “U.S. and Iran trade attacks again after Trump pledges Tehran will ‘pay the price’ for not accepting deal.”
But what if the art of the deal simply doesn’t apply in Iran? “Iran is not a normal nation you can make deals with. It’s a national security threat,” Erfan Fard, a Middle East analyst, argues at Fox Digital. Fard writes:
For nearly half a century, American policymakers have debated how to negotiate with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The real question is whether Washington is still misdiagnosing the problem. Iran is not simply a diplomatic adversary but a regime whose strategy is built on terrorism, proxy warfare and hostility toward the United States.
Why does Washington continue to treat the regime as a negotiating partner when decades of evidence suggest it is a national security threat? The answer lies in a misunderstanding of its nature. Successive administrations have often analyzed Tehran as a conventional state pursuing national interests. It is not. The regime was born as an ideological project built on hostility toward America, Israel and the Western order. …
The problem is that the United States has repeatedly misunderstood the actor across the table. The Islamic Republic has often used diplomacy as a shield, a delay mechanism and a survival tool….
Today the regime may be weaker than it once appeared. Its terrorist network has suffered serious setbacks, damaging Tehran’s illusion as a regional power. …But a weaker regime is not necessarily a safer one. …
“Trump Needs a New Iran Strategy” is the headline on a Wall Street Journal editorial:
After weeks of insisting a deal with Iran is around the corner, President Trump may be admitting the reality. The regime is “tapping the U.S. along” in negotiations, he said Wednesday. The President has given diplomacy a chance, but “they keep playing us for suckers,” he added. Is Mr. Trump ready at last for a new approach?
The President’s choice now is to alter the facts on the ground or leave the conflict in a worse position than Mr. Bush did in Iraq.
A Washington Post editorial admonishes:
Trump has degraded the regime. He’ll squander that progress, and his leverage, if he seems too desperate.
President Trump, who announced that top Iranian officials called him directly to ask him to stop the bombing, even as Iran is targeting Gulf nations, revealed that the U.S. has secretly helped 200 commercial ships and more than 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The president said that this is one reason crude prices aren’t higher. The Wall Street Journal reports that a “sharp fall in China’s crude oil imports during the Iran war has been instrumental in holding down oil prices and keeping the global economy humming.” But can this last? India says that the U.S. attack on a tanker killed three Indian nationals. Stocks are set to rebound after yesterday’s selloff.
Inflation makes going to the grocery store an ugh! experience. CNBC reports that consumer prices rose 4.2% annually in May, the highest in three years:
Inflation accelerated in May as rising energy costs contributed to pain for consumers, though underlying pressures were less intense.
Batya Ungar-Sargon writes that, when it comes to the cost of living, people don’t feel heard by the Trump administration. The Washington Post suggests that new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh may soon be telling President Trump that there will be a rate hike.
The tragedy of Austin Metcalf, whose heart was stopped by the knife thrust by Karmello Anthon, a seemingly promising young man, cannot get more heart-wrenching. But that’s not stopping the race hustlers from capitalizing on it, as Kristen Fleming observes today in the New York Post. You expect outgoing Rep. Jasmine Crockett to get in on the action:
On social media, some have ghoulishly celebrated Metcalf’s death, while race hustlers like Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett are trying to turn this avoidable tragedy into a racial reckoning for a broken nation.
“Black women live in fear and agony every single day. A fear and agony, I promise you the Metcalfs probably never spent a day living that way,” she so callously said in an episode of her podcast, “Clock It with Crockett.” …
“If a 300-pound man is beating me, like on top of me and beating me down, I’m not limited to fists,” she said, presumably saying she’d stab him too. Except Metcalf was 200 pounds and was never on top of Anthony beating him.
Meanwhile, a GoFundMe campaign started by Anthony’s mother has been raising eyebrows. In addition to legal costs, the proceeds enabled the Anthony family to move. If reports that they decamped for New Orleans are true, visiting Karmello in prison will be more difficult.
On the subject of fundraising, GOP lawmakers got nothing beyond repeated assertions of Fifth Amendment rights (even regarding her name) from a top ActBlue official yesterday in a hearing to probe the progressive power house’s alleged foreign donations. An Alabama Rep lashed out:
Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., lashed out at Republican efforts to investigate a Democratic fundraising apparatus on Wednesday afternoon, characterizing the ongoing fraud probe as the most recent instance of GOP retribution against Black women in power.
“Over and over again, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has harassed Black women with bogus lawsuits,” Sewell said on Wednesday morning.
Mike Davis of the Article III Project says that ActBlue is a money-laundering organization for foreign donations into Democratic campaigns.
The “Journey” of an Imperfect Man. George Will astutely seizes on an aspect of Graham Platner that has not received enough attention:
Platner is an interesting bore because he is symptomatic. He and his apologists use the jargon of therapy-speak. It is coined to pave the road of life’s “journey” with off-ramps from accountability.
The “J” word is revealing, as in Platner’s, “My journey is one of transformation.” His identity at the journey’s outset has been replaced by today’s identity, which will be supplanted by tomorrow’s. This endless transforming, this remarkable plasticity of self, is supposedly produced by semi-autonomous psychological churnings. They supposedly can be mitigated (or instigated) by therapy. Platner’s acknowledging a colorful record of bad behavior has become a sign of his everyman “authenticity.”
Ms. Must can’t resist another quote:
Today’s Democratic Party, which has anointed him a “working class” hero, evidently has met few members of that class.
Most such members do not say they are surprised to learn that for 18 years they have had a Nazi tattoo on their chests. (Long before Platner decided to join Daniel Webster on the list of senators from New England, Platner reportedly spoke of his “Totenkopf” tattoo.) Few in the working class get $200,000 mortgages from their father, or have their mothers as their largest customers. (“Oyster farmer” Platner sells to his mother’s restaurant.) His sexting to sundry women occurred, he says by way of extenuation, early in his marriage. (He has been married less than three years.)
Tempus fugit! I hope I have time and space enough for just a few more Essentials: Happy Birthday, Mr. President. In “From Marilyn Monroe to UFC Freedom 250,” Tevi Troy notes that President Trump isn’t the first President to throw himself a big birthday bash. Troy recalls JFK and Marilyn Monroe at Madison Square Garden. … Mr. Trump’s critics are having an absurd freakout over the reflecting of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. … And Hugh Hewitt says don’t be surprised if the GOP presidential field for 2028 has double-digit contenders:
President Trump may endorse and throw his considerable political weight behind VP Vance — or Secretary Rubio or somebody else. Nobody knows and it’s very doubtful the president himself knows. He’s said a few times that a Vance-Rubio ticket would be formidable and it would be.
What it isn’t is “inevitable.” GOP primary voters don’t have to begin actually casting votes until January 2028. Will they want a “reversion to the mean” of GOP politics and issues? Will they want a candidate who can endorse what President Trump has done in every aspect or one who picks and chooses among the Trump record?
