Donald Trump Is Very, Very Angry About His Biggest Failure. There’s Almost Nothing He Can Do About It.

Politics Iran is destined to become the signature failure of his second term. There’s almost nothing he can do about it. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images and Qeeraw/Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Surge, the newsletter that covers the most important political nonsense of the week, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which figures we must be living in truly dark times if even a trip to Taco Bell can make you feel gross afterward. This week: Maine Democrats have a new Senate nominee; just be sure to wear a helmet if you get near him. We have a brief couple of weeks to make jokes about the candidates in South Carolina’s quickie Republican Senate primary, and we intend to use them. Ukraine has picked up a powerful new ally in an internet weirdo who has Donald Trump’s ear. Seriously, though. Speaking of Trump, we are going old-fashioned in this edition, with a double-barrel start on the big guy and his questionable foreign policy decisions. 1. Donald Trump Stuck. The recently resumed hostilities with Iran are not going well. Four U.S. service members were killed this week, bringing the total to 18 since the war began. (Did you hear that, Department of Defense? It’s 18.) The U.S. has bombed Iranian targets for the last two weeks to no apparent change in Iran’s negotiating posture. The Houthis have saddled up to threaten shipping through the Red Sea, while the Strait of Hormuz remains a mess. Oil prices have shot back up since the end of the ceasefire, which affects a lot more than the price of gasoline. MAGA voters continue to sour on the conflict. The war is also expensive. All of this is making Trump incredibly mad, since there’s no clear way to get out of it absent the deployment of ground troops. As one source told Politico this week, “the president is now fully aware that the only way to the victory that he wants is completely politically impossible. The American people just will not support the kind of escalation it would take at this point.” We don’t mean to neener-neener the president at a delicate and dangerous moment.But this is yet another time for a reminder that if you’re thinking about starting a war, it’s wise to get buy-in from important stakeholders such as the U.S. Congress, the American people, or any of your allies. Anyone, really. 2. Donald Trump, Part ii A historic nuclear deal! Actually … no nuclear deal. To the extent that you were already not familiar: Our man wakes up every day and wings it with whatever international chess pieces are available to him. This week, Trump announced and his administration signed a deal that would supply Saudi Arabia with nuclear energy technology. It was a big win for Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose goal is to diversify the kingdom’s economy beyond oil. Here’s what the U.S. got in return: … hold on, we’re just looking it up still … Hmm, alas, we’re not sure what the U.S. got in return. Potential nuclear proliferation in the Middle East? Is that something we wanted? The following day, however, Trump posted on social media that finalization of the deal was “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” i.e., normalizing relations with Israel. But Saudi Arabia won’t strike a deal to normalize relations with Israel unless Israel works toward creating a Palestinian state, and we all know Israel’s current interest level in doing that. What happened here? Did Israel complain to Trump about the nuclear deal, and Trump stood down? Isn’t Trump pissed at Israel these days, though? No one knows. It is all being done minute by minute, with no overarching strategy, based on whichever person calls him last before he smashes send on those morning Truth Social posts. 3. Troy Jackson Warm body to run against Susan Collins: secured. The Maine Democratic Party will hold its convention to nominate a replacement for Graham Platner in the Senate race this weekend. When the convention was first announced, it sounded like it might be a thrilling opportunity to see real wheeling and dealing on a convention floor from which a nominee would eventually emerge. Nope! Most of the delegates elected to the convention last weekend support former state Senate President Troy Jackson, and all of his meaningful rivals quickly dropped out. Jackson, who lost the Democratic primary for governor earlier this year, is a logger from far northern Aroostook County whose views turned more progressive as time went on. In the build-up to the convention, though, the Washington Post reported on some stories from Maine that had been bubbling up on social media about his temper and shouting matches with fellow lawmakers. Most notably, he “once angrily threw a water bottle in a meeting after he couldn’t persuade a lawmaker to vote his way.” We don’t condone bottle-throwing in meetings. It’s certainly rude. We also don’t really—what’s the word?—care. No more nominee takebacks, Maine Democrats. This is your guy. 4. John Thune A reconciliation bill to nowhere. House Republicans this week passed the framework for a third reconciliation bill—which bypasses the 60-vote Senate filibuster rule—of Donald Trump’s presidency. This framework, once fleshed out, would offer up to $73 billion for the military and intelligence services to cover the Iran war, $12 billion to bail out farmers screwed over by Trump’s trade policies, and $10 billion in incentives to states to offer some of the election reforms from the SAVE America Act, the GOP’s flagship voting bill that remains mega-dead in the Senate. Well, this reconciliation framework is likely mega-dead in the Senate, too. There are not at this moment 50 Republican senators who want to vote on big bucks for the dreadfully unpopular Iran war or elements of the SAVE Act, and Republicans certainly don’t want to vote on unlimited Democratic amendments in a campaign season. Senate Majority Leader John Thune isn’t concealing his disinterest in what the House is offering, saying that he wants to focus on government funding instead. In a White House press briefing on Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump’s “patience is running out” with the Senate.In response to this, Thune told reporters that “maybe she or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes.” Everything’s going great. 5. Darline Graham A suddenly crowded South Carolina primary. Move over, Maine Democrats: It’s South Carolina’s turn for a quickie Senate primary that everyone jumps into. Candidate filing opened this week for the Republican primary to replace deceased Sen. Lindsey Graham on November’s ballot. The primary will be held on Aug. 11 with a potential runoff on Aug. 25. It took many by surprise, then, when Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham, decided this week to run for a full term, even though she was considered to be a caretaker for the seat until the end of the year. She has Trump’s endorsement. But no one really knows anything about Darline Graham, so a few others are deciding to give it a shot. Rep. Russell Fry has entered the race, and why not? He’s allowed to keep running in his House reelection campaign concurrently, so it’s a free roll at a Senate seat. Rep. Ralph Norman did his best impression of a Maine Democrat by entering the race after losing his gubernatorial primary earlier in the year, and the candidate that Lindsey Graham defeated in his primary earlier this year, businessman Mark Lynch, has also joined. But—God bless—our favorite entrant into the race is Mark Sanford, the former governor whose political trajectory collapsed when he was busted visiting Argentina to see his mistress. Since that scandal, he has since served in his old House seat again, gotten primaried out of it for not appreciating Donald Trump enough, and run for president for a few months in the 2020 cycle, among other reported activities. Hopefully the primary is venomous. We could all use a little pick-me-up. 6. Zohran Mamdani Stunt called off. The New York City mayor promised during his 2025 campaign that he would order the New York Police Department to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he stepped foot in the city. With Netanyahu’s annual trip to the United Nations General Assembly in September looming, it was time for the mayor to decide whether he would actually follow through with this. In a video he released this week, he announced he would not. “My administration has reviewed every avenue available, under applicable law, to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here,” he said. “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.” No kidding. May we ask: Did anyone really believe he would follow through on this bit of aspirational rhetoric? Did anyone genuinely think that he would send a couple of cops from the night beat to arrest a foreign head of state visiting the United Nations, under a warrant from an international body of justice that the United States doesn’t recognize? It was about as fantastical as believing that Trump would have Mexico pay to build the U.S. border wall. There’s no reason for Mamdani’s supporters to be disappointed, because it was never a serious idea to begin with. 7. laura loomer A sudden and mysterious shift on Ukraine. The conspiratorial MAGA influencer (and thus close confidant of Trump) has changed. Like most of her ilk, she was exceptionally critical of Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky for years during the war, saying the country was full of “Nazi apologists” and calling Zelensky a “jihadi apologist.” This week, however, she visited Ukraine, interviewed Zelensky, and changed her tune on the conflict. She is now staunchly pro-Ukraine and observed that “I feel like such an asshole for minimizing the struggle of Ukrainians for the last 5 years,” explaining that “we have been so propagandized by Russia and we don’t even realize it.” (A lot of people realized that the right-wing influencers had been propagandized by Russia.) This is all well and good. Hopefully it makes some difference in right-wing politics and, more importantly, Trump’s view of the conflict. But—now it’s our turn to play conspiracy theorist—it’s also terribly difficult to take her conversion at face value. How does someone who’s built her substantial MAGA following and income in part by checking the “Hate Ukraine” box suddenly get on a trip to Kyiv to interview all of its powerful people and announce that she had been wrong all along? We’re talking about a complete 180. Loomer, for what it’s worth, has denied that she was paid by the Ukrainian government for the trip. Democrats Donald Trump Iran Republicans Senate Lindsey Graham The Surge Ukraine Maine South Carolina