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Donald Trump deserves plenty of criticism for his serial dishonesty, but on the rare occasions when he speaks frankly, that causes problems too.
This week, a reporter asked the president whether the deteriorating economic situation has created any urgency for him to reach a peace deal with Iran. “Not even a little bit,” he replied. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”
Who can doubt that he was being sincere? Trump has conducted the war as though he is both uninterested in and unaware of the economic effects that it is having. He has reportedly mused about simply withdrawing from the field of battle and leaving the Strait of Hormuz closed, despite the disruption that has caused for global trade. He’s previously called talk about affordability a “hoax.” And with his own bank accounts growing fatter through corruption, he doesn’t feel the pinch of inflation himself.
Trump, a billionaire who inherited a real-estate fortune, has always been a curious sort of populist. As I have written, he managed to convincingly campaign as one by flaunting his genuine scorn for cultural and intellectual elites. This served him well for many years, especially during the 2024 presidential election, when inflation was a major concern for many voters. Once in office, however, Trump didn’t actually have any ideas for combating rising prices. He’s hardly unusual in this—elected officials have few good tools for fighting inflation, though most of them at least act sympathetic. Joe Biden tried a different path, trying to convince voters that they weren’t really experiencing high costs. (It didn’t work out well for him.) Trump’s decision to tell voters that he just doesn’t care is a novel strategy, but not a very promising one.
The sentiment that Trump was (apparently) trying to convey might be defensible in some cases. When the nation is at war, a president must at times call on the people to make sacrifices in the name of the greater good. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt all did this. The conservative commentator Marc Thiessen, using tortured logic, argues that “if we cannot accept a few months of higher inflation and a few months of higher gas prices in order to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, we’re not a superpower anymore.” The problem is that Trump hasn’t definitively stated that ending Iran’s nuclear program is the goal of the war, nor has he laid out any reasonable path to achieving it. As a result, the president is asking Americans to suffer for no clear reason, and he is also suggesting that he doesn’t care about their suffering.
This was only the worst in a string of notable gaffes from Trump over the past few days. Over the apparent objection of First Lady Melania Trump, he said that the White House was a “shit house” when he arrived. Trump used to be celebrated for the creativity of his insults, but this week he kept it simple, snapping at a reporter who asked him about the ballooning cost of his planned East Wing ballroom: “I doubled the size of it, you dumb person.” The president also can’t get his story straight on whether he selected or even knows the contractor adding a garish cerulean hue to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
When a reporter asked the president how he’d respond to Black voters worried that changes to congressional districts—changes spearheaded by his GOP allies and urged on by his Justice Department—would reduce Black representation, he replied, “I think it’s been a wonderful process.” This may have been another moment of imprudent honesty, but at least he’s answering his 2016 question to Black voters: “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Will these remarks hurt Trump? One plausible answer is that they won’t. He’s been making outrageous statements for years, and it hasn’t slowed down his political career. Another possibility is that they will but that it doesn’t matter to him. His approval rating continues to decline steadily. CNN’s Harry Enten noted with amazement this week that Trump owns the five worst polls on inflation of any U.S. president in history. But Trump, who won’t face voters again, seems less concerned with poor polling than he was in his first term.
The catch is that although Trump won’t face another election, many of his fellow Republicans will in less than six months. Republicans have been pleading with the White House to formulate and stick with a consistent message for the midterms. Instead, they’re getting a president who is either nodding off in public or dismissing the concerns of the public.
The media have puzzled over Trump’s fixation on footwear this spring. The president has commented on aides’ choice of dress shoes, and he presented a visibly ill-fitting pair to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But perhaps Trump cares so much about feet and what goes on them because he knows that, sooner or later, he will place his own in his mouth.
Related:
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
- President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping ended a high-stakes summit in Beijing today. Trump said that the two discussed “in great detail” a delayed U.S. weapons sale to Taiwan but did not talk about tariffs; he also said that the United States did not ask China “for any favors” in resolving tensions over the Strait of Hormuz.
- Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk and a prominent 2020-election denier who is serving a nine-year prison sentence for tampering with voting machines during the 2020 election.
- A judge declared a mistrial in Harvey Weinstein’s latest New York sex-crimes case after jurors said that they were deadlocked on a rape charge involving the former actor Jessica Mann. The case is the third trial tied to Mann’s allegations against Weinstein, who is serving a 16-year prison sentence after being convicted of rape in California in 2022, and whose original 2020 conviction in New York was overturned in 2024. Prosecutors have not yet said whether they will seek another retrial.
Evening Read
A Cautious New Approach to Trump’s Impeachments at the Smithsonian
By Kelsey Ables
For the past year, the Smithsonian Institution has found itself in the awkward position of telling the nation’s story while being supported in part by a government that wants to narrow how that story is told. In December, the White House threatened to revoke funding to the institution if it did not hand over a trove of wall texts and exhibit plans for a review. So when a permanent exhibition of presidential portraits closed for a refresh earlier this spring, whether some important but unsavory facts about the current president would be there when it reopened was unclear.
Now we know: The “America’s Presidents” galleries at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., are back, and President Trump’s two impeachments are technically there. But they are mentioned without context, in a way that underlines the Smithsonian’s touchy relationship with an administration that has not hesitated to strong-arm the institution.
Read the full article.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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