Trump Loses the Plot

On tonight’s show I’ll be talking about Donald Trump’s increasingly bizarre priorities -- starting with his obsession with construction at the White House. The new ballroom is reportedly already 65% complete, Trump’s giant arch is supposed to begin construction in just two weeks, and Eric Trump says his father sometimes calls him at 9:30 at night because he wants to go inspect the ballroom construction. Trump is even talking about changing the columns in front of the White House. Meanwhile, he’s pointing to strong job growth as a reason the Federal Reserve should lower interest rates -- when strong economic growth is generally the opposite argument, because it gives the Fed more room to keep rates higher if inflation remains a concern. And Trump is now reportedly planning to use the controversial Qatari jet for an overseas trip to Ireland.

I’ll also have a major update on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s rhetoric has shifted rather dramatically. First he threatened to destroy Iranian bridges and power plants if Iran didn’t reopen the strait. Then he declared that America “owns” and “controls” Hormuz and claimed oil tankers were moving through constantly. Now he’s talking about building alternative oil-export routes and threatening that Iran could end up with a Strait of Hormuz that simply isn’t very important anymore. That sounds considerably less like someone who actually controls the strait. And we’ll look at the Reuters analysis concluding that the U.S. strike on an Iranian wedding reception appears to have been a direct hit rather than incidental damage -- killing four people, including two minors, and injuring 68.

Then there’s Trump and the midterms. Trump is now talking about the hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in his super PAC as though the money personally belongs to him. It doesn’t. He says he’ll spend whatever amount is necessary on the 2026 election, with the midterms only about two months away, but legally that is not his personal money to direct however he chooses. At the same time, a new poll finds significant buyer’s remorse among some Trump voters: 18% of his 2024 voters say they regret their vote, including 30% of Trump voters ages 18 to 34, with especially high numbers among Black and Latino voters and independents.

We’re also going to talk about Trump saying the United States could simply stop trading with Mexico because, according to him, we don’t get anything from Mexico that we really need. The actual numbers tell a very different story. Mexico is the largest foreign market for U.S. goods exports, buying hundreds of billions of dollars in American products. American factories depend heavily on Mexican auto parts and components. Mexico supplies a huge share of the fruits and vegetables Americans eat. And American farmers sell Mexico enormous quantities of corn, soybeans, pork, dairy and poultry. Cutting off that relationship would not just hurt Mexico -- it would hit American manufacturers, American farmers and American consumers.

There’s also a disturbing story out of New Jersey, where the Trump administration denied the state’s appeal for $84 million in federal disaster assistance after a February blizzard. Regional FEMA and NOAA officials had reportedly cleared the requests, but the administration rejected them anyway, fitting into a broader pattern of Democratic states having more difficulty obtaining disaster relief while Republican states have generally had fewer problems.

We’ll get into the latest bizarre media drama as well. Maria Bartiromo’s attorney is now vehemently denying reports that she was fired from Fox, calling those reports completely false and threatening that there are “receipts and witnesses” that will eventually come out. Trump, meanwhile, is once again claiming that he personally stopped eight wars and complaining that he hasn’t received the Nobel Peace Prize. We’ll go through Daniel Dale’s breakdown of that claim, because several of Trump’s supposed “wars” either were never wars at all, never actually ended, or involved disputes where Trump’s role is highly contested. There are a couple of cases where Trump and his team clearly did play a meaningful diplomatic role -- but that is very different from saying he “stopped eight wars.”

I’ll also talk about how Trump looked yesterday, and about the White House putting out some truly ugly material -- including a racist game built around “building a wall” and “catching the illegal,” along with another strange eagle-themed game. And finally, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are heading to Moscow and Kyiv this weekend in another attempt to revive talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. We’ll look at what they’re trying to accomplish and whether there’s any reason to think these talks will go anywhere.

And one quick programming note: David Pakman on September 8.