One of my great meta-journalistic interests is to observe the moments when more or less obvious political realities enter D.C. conventional wisdom. They’re not strongly overlapping Venn diagrams. They often diverge pretty dramatically. I noticed one of those moments Saturday when Axios published this piece entitled “Term-limited Trump mortgages GOP’s future.” The headline mostly speaks for itself. President Trump won’t face voters again. So he’s increasingly indifferent to his political standing or perhaps more specifically unwilling to shift from or limit unpopular policies. It’s true that there are big consequences for Trump in the midterm elections. But even in the biggest blowout election Democrats aren’t going to gain supermajorities that would allow them to pass veto-proof legislation or remove Trump from office. Given the scale of High Court corruption, investigations will amount to trench warfare.

We’re over a decade into the Trump era. To assess the damage his two terms have wrought and how, exactly, we got here, TPM’s David Kurtz was joined on Substack Live by friend of TPM and charter member of our DC bureau, Brian Beutler, who now writes the Off Message newsletter. 

In a wide-ranging conversation, David and Brian discussed Trump’s propaganda campaign around his war in Iran; how the Democrats could act as a true opposition party; and what the U.S. could look like come Jan. 2027 or 2029 depending on how the next two rounds of federal elections shake out. 

Check out their full live below.

I want to reiterate all the points I made about Trump’s speech last night. Just for the sake of his own political standing, the whole idea was a mistake. It wasn’t a good speech. It wasn’t delivered well. And it didn’t either make favorable news or actually address the issues that have the public or energy markets upset. I didn’t realize as I was watching the speech that his vague “two to three weeks” prediction of when the war will end was really just a restatement of what we might call the Trumpian Constant, the prescribed duration after Trump will, purportedly, always have gotten things worked out and awesome. The time before the Obamacare replacement plan is released, when infrastructure week will finally arrive. I mean, two weeks is genuinely a cliche with Trump or, in more modern parlance, a meme. Trump just tacked on another week. As you might have seen there are lots of charts floating around showing how the price of oil and oil futures spiked pretty dramatically during his speech.

I had a moment of insight or perhaps revelation early in this war when the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz first became central in the news and President Trump was publicly debating whether he would use the U.S. Navy to escort ships through it. Would he, won’t he? Will it happen tomorrow? What will he decide. Then I was watching a YouTube show about maritime shipping. In passing the host, Sal Mercogliano, noted that, at that time at least, there weren’t any U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf at all. And the kind of ships you need, in the numbers you’d need, were hundreds of even thousands of miles away. That made perfect sense since for the kind of war the U.S. is currently fighting we don’t need naval vessels anywhere near that close to the combat zone, and when they are that close they become much more vulnerable to attack. But the point is that the whole debate about whether Trump was about to do that any time in the near future was entirely contained within Trump’s Truth Social world. It wasn’t connected to any of the hard realities of whether any of that was even possible.