The 1600: Is Trump Losing a Step?

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Good morning,

🎶Thursday Listening: Gordon Lightfoot - Sundown

Let's start this disgustingly hot and humid day off with a little thought experiment. The 79-year-old president of the United States is asked in the Oval Office if he has plans to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve. He responds, "I was surprised he was appointed" and then goes on to blame his predecessor for something he did in his first term. Would you be asking questions about the president's mental acuity after that exchange?

Because that exact sequence of events happened yesterday—on camera—and nobody in the room corrected Trump or gently reminded him that it was he who appointed Jerome Powell in 2017, and that Biden merely reappointed him in the middle of Covid in the name of stability. Trump's misremembering of this relatively important piece of information didn't really get picked up in the press. Would that have been the case if it was anyone else? If Joe Biden threatened to fire someone he appointed, and then when asked about it blamed Trump for appointing him, people would rightly be asking questions about whether ol' Joe was still with the ballgame.

One of the many contradictions of the Trump era is that he is both pilloried in the media, but also given a pass and graded on a curve at the same time. He gets away with 10 things a day that would have sunk other presidencies. It's always been his political superpower.

That back-and-forth in the Oval yesterday didn't happen in isolation. There's a handful of recent examples that raise the legitimate question of whether Trump is losing a bit of his fastball. His messaging on the Smeffrey Smepstein saga has been nothing short of a disaster. Like, I've never actually seen him so ill-equipped to spin a story that's bad for him. He is the king of that! Literally nobody on earth is better at shifting the national conversation by sheer force of their own personality. But look at how he's been handling this growing crisis, which has now jumped containment from the world of politics to pop culture with Shane Gillis' (very funny) monologue at the ESPYs last night.

It started with the lame attempt to change the conversation by attacking Rosie O'Donnell. That didn't work and now he can't seem to stop tweeting about it, yesterday referring to his own supporters who have questions about the case... questions members of his own administration have been fanning... as "weaklings" and disowning their support. That came after he said he didn't "understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. It's pretty boring stuff. I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going."

This is new for him. I've covered this man for a decade now, and he has never been so dismissive toward his own base before. It's worth asking why this story has taken him so off kilter. And I haven't even mentioned Trump's recent bizarre off-hand remark about how his uncle taught the Unabomber at MIT, which did not happen, or that Obama and Hillary "made up" the Epstein files, despite the fact that Epstein "killed himself" while in the custody of Trump's DOJ!

There have also been a number of instances lately of Trump just appearing to be completely out of the loop with major aspects of his own admin. Not once, but three times this year the Pentagon has paused military aid to Ukraine, only to have to restart it once Trump got wind. A couple weeks ago, the president seemed to have no idea what a reporter was talking about when they asked him whether the new tariff deadline was July 9 or August 1. On the Big, Beautiful Bill negotiations, Trump was by all accounts unaware of the extent of the Medicaid cuts, which came after he told GOP lawmakers they could not cut Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security if they wanted to win their next election.

Look, Trump has always governed in a chaotic way and he's never been known to be a micro-manager. No POTUS can be abreast of everything happening in the federal government in realtime, and to Trump's credit he is 100x more available than Biden ever was, so that creates more opportunities for him to misspeak or appear out of the loop. And he also has this crazy lifeforce that, combined with the costume makeup, makes him seem younger than his 79 years. But the president is old, and he's getting older. Not even Donald J. Trump can win a battle against Father Time.

My suggestion is that we pass a constitutional amendment so Trump can run again in 2028, and then convince the Dems to run Biden against him. I just want to see that debate rematch with both of these guys well into their 80s. The matchup America deserves.

Trump vs. Powell: How Firing the Fed Chair Could Shake the Economy​

It was Donald Trump who, back in 2017, stood in the White House Rose Garden and introduced his pick for Federal Reserve chair as a "wise steward of the economy." But the relationship between Trump and Jerome Powell quickly soured, culminating this week with Trump floating the idea of firing Powell—before saying on Wednesday that he was unlikely to do so. Read more.

Also happening:

• Senate vote: The Senate has approved a Trump administration request to cut $9 billion in foreign aid and public broadcasting funding in a victory for the president. The vote, early Thursday morning, was passed 51 to 48 following 12 hours of amendment votes, despite two Republicans objecting to the surrender of congressional control over federal funding. Here's the latest.
• Trump allies split over Epstein: A number of President Donald Trump's biggest allies in the House of Representatives have split with him and called for the complete release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert co-sponsored a discharge petition announced by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna to force a vote in the House to release the complete files. Read more.

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