Although not all of the relevant details are yet clear, according to U.S. Central Command, an Army AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed off the coast of Oman; the two crew members on board were rescued and are now in stable condition. Whether the incident was the result of a deliberate Iranian attack is the subject of some debate.

One day after the developments, Donald Trump spoke to The Wall Street Journal and downplayed the importance of the incident. In fact, according to the Journal, the president “repeatedly” said the downing of the helicopter “wasn’t a big deal.” Hours later, the Republican did a 180-degree turn, decided it was a very big deal after all, and approved a new military offensive against Iranian targets.

Trump offered additional insights on his perspective with a pop culture reference that he didn’t appear to fully understand. The Washington Post reported:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday night appeared to defend his latest military strikes on Iran by posting a short clip from “The West Wing,” the popular NBC television drama about a fictional U.S. president, in which the show’s characters debate their own military action.

In the video Trump promoted on his social media platform, he referred to an episode from the show’s first season in which Syria downed a U.S. military plane. The clip, which ran about a minute and a half, showed the fictional American president in the White House Situation Room, expressing his dissatisfaction with the idea of a “proportional response.”

Voicing support for a “disproportional response,” the fictional president declares, “Let the word ring forth from this time and this place, gentlemen — you kill an American, any American, we don’t come back with a proportional response. We come back with total disaster.”

This evidently resonated with Trump, who promoted the excerpt late Tuesday. What the incumbent president neglected to do, however, is to watch the rest of the episode.

In the show, the president eventually concedes his initial reaction was reckless and overly emotional, and that the kind of “disproportional response” he initially envisioned would lead to civilian casualties. Indeed, the whole point of the episode was that responsible global superpowers reject the very idea of a “disproportional response.”

Trump, in other words, got it backward.

It wasn’t the first time. Exactly one year ago, my MS NOW colleague Hayes Brown noted that Trump had touted “Les Misérables” while clearly missing the point of the production. A month earlier, the Republican tried to have a little fun with “Star Wars” day, but he inadvertently promoted an image that presented him as a villain.

These weren’t isolated incidents. In 2019, for example, the Republican White House tried to use “Game of Thrones” as part of a clumsy argument about the president’s border wall project, and the whole thing fell apart rather quickly. A year later, Trump talked about the Capt. William Bligh character from “Mutiny on the Bounty,” though it wasn’t altogether clear whether the president realized that Bligh is the villain of that story.

After his defeat in 2020, Trump talked obsessively about fictional character Hannibal Lecter, including a weird instance in which he referred to the infamous cannibal from “The Silence of the Lambs” as “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” and “a wonderful man.”

Maybe the president should just steer clear of making pop culture references? He’s clearly not good at it.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Still struggling with pop culture, Trump whiffs on point of ‘West Wing’ clip appeared first on MS NOW.

Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has maintained a rather high profile lately. In late April, for example, he appeared on CNBC and celebrated Donald Trump’s “palpable” commitment to the First Amendment. A few weeks later, Clayton also made the case on CNBC that the defunct $1.766 billion compensation fund had merit because “they” tried to “destroy” the president.

As recently as Monday, as the White House pushed conspiracy theories about election results in California, Clayton again toed the party line on national television, arguing the public is “right to question” the vote tallies.

If that was an audition for a promotion, it was apparently a successful one. On Thursday afternoon, Trump announced by way of his social media platform:

I am pleased to announce the Nomination of very Highly Respected Jay Clayton, former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the former Head of Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the most prominent and successful Law Firms anywhere in the World, and the current United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to be the next Director of National Intelligence and, importantly, to serve in my Cabinet. Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay. I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

If confirmed, Clayton would succeed outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard, whose resignation will take effect next week.

Clayton isn’t as outlandish a choice as Bill Pulte, whom the president recently tapped to serve as the acting DNI, but it would be an exaggeration to say his looming nomination is entirely uncontroversial.

In mid-November, Trump went even further than he usually does in directing the Justice Department to target his perceived political foes and critics, announcing that he wanted then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and federal law enforcement officials to investigate former President Bill Clinton and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, among others, over their alleged Jeffrey Epstein ties.

Four hours later, Bondi did as she was told, announcing via social media that she was tapping Clayton, who chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term, to “take the lead” on the matter.

In other words, the president’s new choice to serve as the director of national intelligence — an office that Trump has freely admitted that he wants to weaponize for political purposes — has spent the last seven months investigating Trump’s opponents at the president’s insistence.

It’s the sort of thing that should give senators pause while weighing whether to confirm him.

What’s more, despite the statutory qualifications for the office, which require a DNI to have significant experience in intelligence, Clayton is a former Wall Street lawyer with no background in intelligence.

As for Pulte, it’s not yet entirely clear whether Trump sees him as the odd man out, or whether the White House still expects the highly controversial director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to serve as acting DNI until there’s a confirmation vote on Clayton. Watch this space.

The post Trump says he will nominate Jay Clayton to succeed Tulsi Gabbard as the DNI appeared first on MS NOW.

For nearly a year and a half, the list of Jan. 6 rioters who received pardons from Donald Trump only to run into fresh trouble with the law after receiving clemency has grown, reaching unsettling lengths.

Hoping to determine exactly how long the list is, Lawfare, a nonprofit legal issues publication, published a study last week that found at least 97 people charged in connection with the assault on the Capitol have since been accused of new crimes.

Jake Lang, however, stands out as a special case. The Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday:

A far-right influencer who has repeatedly tried to inflame racial tensions around the Karmelo Anthony case was arrested Tuesday and accused of making terroristic threats.

Jake Lang was booked into the Dallas County jail and faces a charge of terroristic threat to place the public in fear of serious bodily injury, interrupting public services, or influencing a government, according to jail records. He was arrested by Texas Department of Public Safety officers, and bail is set at $1 million.

Lang was arrested after he allegedly threatened extrajudicial mob violence against a Black teenager.

If his name sounds at all familiar, it might be because Lang was also arrested last week and charged with criminal trespass outside a rally in Texas.

In February, he was also arrested in Minneapolis after destroying an ice sculpture that was outside the state Capitol, which came around the same time Lang was charged with threatening a police officer who served at the Capitol.

In other words, nearly 100 rioters have been accused of new crimes after receiving pardons from Trump, but only one has been charged on four separate occasions. (Lang has denied wrongdoing.)

Highlighting the broader pattern, the editorial board of The New York Times recently published an opinion piece arguing that the American public “deserves to understand the mayhem that the Jan. 6 pardons have unleashed.”

Given the circumstances, the appeal was hardly unreasonable.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Pardoned Jan. 6 rioter arrested yet again, accused of making terroristic threats appeared first on MS NOW.

As this week got underway, the public saw Donald Trump abruptly end his latest “Meet the Press” interview when NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked the president whether he had evidence to support his election conspiracy theories. “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” the Republican told the host instead of answering the question like an adult who wasn’t making stuff up.

Unprompted, Trump returned to the subject Wednesday at an unrelated White House event, telling reporters:

They rigged the election, the second election, as you probably heard and probably know, most of you know, that happened and now it’s been proven, and it will be proven as time goes by, even more so. We have things that you won’t believe. When we release the full files, you’re not going to believe how crooked the second, the 2020 election was.

He made the comments while surrounded by congressional Republican leaders, who simply nodded along.

Trump: "They rigged the election. Now it's been proven, and it will be proven even more as time goes by even more so. We have things that you won't believe. When we release the full files, you won't believe how crooked the 2020 election was."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-10T16:04:29.518Z

There’s probably no point in rehashing what reality-based observers already know: The election wasn’t rigged; it isn’t “proven”; Trump and his team haven’t found “things”; there is no “they”; etc.

What I found notable about this, however, was the idea that there might still be people out there who are willing to believe that the president may yet uncover and release some evidence of a conspiracy that did not and does not exist.

Six months ago, for example, Trump sat down with Politico’s Dasha Burns, and when she brought up the president’s views on Russia’s war in Ukraine, his brain quickly shifted to what he described as the “rigged election.” Trump declared at the time, “It’s going to come out over the next couple of months too, loud and clear, because we have all the information.”

A couple of months came and went. The “information” never surfaced, because there is no such information.

For nearly six years, Trump and his team, like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, have said the evidence to support the election conspiracy theories really is on the way. Any day now. Just you wait. It’ll be awesome.

My advice for those waiting for the president to follow through on his vow: Stop. He can’t produce that which does not exist.

The post Hoping to persuade the gullible, Trump vows to share proof of 2020 conspiracy theories appeared first on MS NOW.

Immediately after professing his “love” of inflation at a White House event, Donald Trump went on to tell reporters on Wednesday afternoon about an operation he’s been eager to disclose.

“You know, I can say it now, something you didn’t know,” the president said. “You know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran — until right now.” He said this operation involved 22 ships that traveled “with no lights” and went undetected because Iranians “don’t have any radar because we blasted the crap out of it.”

Trump added, by way of a statement published to his social media platform, that this was “a secret mission.”

Soon after, during a congressional hearing, Energy Secretary Chris Wright was asked if he knew what the president was talking about. The Cabinet secretary conceded he was “unaware” of the developments Trump described, and he assured lawmakers the president was merely “talking casually.”

That wasn’t much of an answer, and it left unresolved the obvious underlying questions: Had Trump disclosed an actual secret mission? Had he kept it from his own energy secretary?

The New York Times shed additional light on the subject soon after.

As often happens with Mr. Trump, the truth was less dramatic. According to a senior U.S. military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the president was referring to an American effort to steer the passage of dozens of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.

While the operation was surreptitious enough — the U.S.-guided vessels have been turning off their transponders to avoid detection when crossing the narrow waterway — it could hardly have been news to Iran. Late last month, The New York Times published an article about the effort, reporting that U.S. Central Command had shepherded around 70 commercial ships through the strait.

In other words, when the president said “nobody” knew of the operation, he apparently meant nobody except everyone who read the Times’ article that was published on May 31.

I had a professor in college who used to joke about politicians who “burst through open doors.” This comes to mind often when watching the current White House.

Indeed, it came up last week when Trump said it was a “big thing” that he and his team had persuaded Iranian officials to agree not to pursue a nuclear weapon. Except, as anyone who’s followed the issue has long understood, Iran has been saying this same thing for more than a half-century.

I can appreciate the broader political dynamic: Trump, struggling in the polls and short on successes, appears desperate to share some good news, especially about a war that hasn’t gone according to his expectations. But pointing to meaningless accomplishments and disclosing operations that have already been disclosed aren’t going to turn things around for him.

The post Bursting through an open door, Trump hyped an already disclosed ‘secret mission’ appeared first on MS NOW.

Control of the Senate in the next Congress might very well come down to the closely watched contest in Maine, where longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins is seeking a sixth term. On the surface, Democrats have reason for cautious optimism: Collins is New England’s only remaining GOP senator, and recent polling suggests many Mainers are ready for a change in a year that’s shaping up to be a rough one for the incumbent’s party.

But against that backdrop, Maine Democrats have decided to take a gamble on nominating oyster farmer Graham Platner, a Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The list of controversies from his background is not short: Platner has faced difficult questions about online comments downplaying sexual assault in the military, his since-removed tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol, allegations he sent sexually explicit texts to several women who were not his wife and, most recently, allegations from three ex-girlfriends about volatile personal behavior, some of which he’s denied.

Platner nevertheless easily won his party primary this week, and soon after, the National Republican Senatorial Committee circulated a memo warning donors and allies to take him seriously.

“The political fundamentals in Maine remain challenging, and it is a fatal mistake to assume Platner is too damaged to win,” the NRSC wrote. “He is currently leading.”

With this in mind, Donald Trump decided to weigh in on the race during an unrelated White House event on Wednesday afternoon, formally endorsing Collins and condemning her Democratic rival in stark terms. The president told reporters in the Oval Office:

I watched that thug that’s up in Maine. He’s a thug. … I mean, he’s worse than any human being that’s ever run for office, probably. I don’t know him. I don’t want to say bad, but I just, look, I mean, nobody’s ever had a record like that. […]

I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s a thug. I know thugs. I had to deal with thugs. I built a lot of buildings, I dealt with the toughest people on earth. I dealt with worse than thugs. This guy’s a thug. He’s a low-level thug. … he’s just an outright pig. He’s like a pig; I watched him a couple of times. He’s like a pig, that’s what he reminds me of. I come up with good names for people.

To be sure, it’s fair to say Platner is a controversial candidate who will have to prove himself over the next 21 weeks. Unlike most Democratic Senate candidates, the Mainer will have to make the case, not just for his vision and priorities, but that he’s overcome mistakes from his past.

But I’m not sure if Trump fully appreciates just how poor a messenger he is for his message.

After all, the president is a convicted felon who was under federal criminal indictment as recently as two years ago. Trump also ran a fraudulent charity, a fraudulent “university” and his business was found to have engaged in systemic fraud.

In the E. Jean Carroll civil case, a jury found him liable for sexual abuse, and Carroll is one of many women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Relatedly, much of the public is probably familiar with the infamous “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump said, in the context of his aggressive pursuit of women, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

This is just a small sampling of a record that includes countless examples of racism, in addition to remarks denigrating American military heroism. (He likes people “who weren’t captured,” for example.)

If Republicans want to make the case that Platner is a controversial candidate, there’s little point in denying the claim. But for Trump, of all people, to say the Mainer might be “worse than any human being that’s ever run for office” is a remarkable failure of self-awareness.

The post Why Trump is the wrong messenger to make the case against Maine’s Platner appeared first on MS NOW.

The challenge in picking Donald Trump’s favorite distraction is that the competition is brutally fierce. The president’s ballroom vanity project, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the White House venue for the upcoming UFC fight are certainly near the top of the lengthy and growing list.

But don’t forget about his interest in a massive “triumphal” arch just across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial, in front of Arlington National Cemetery. The Washington Post reported:

Federal officials are laying more groundwork to begin construction on President Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot-tall triumphal arch, sharing additional documents that detail the project’s scope and an aggressive timetable for potentially completing work before Trump’s term ends.

According to National Park Service documents posted this month, the administration envisions 20 hours per day of construction on the arch, year-round, in hopes of completing the project within two to three years. Construction experts said that timeline — which would involve two 10-hour daily shifts — is aggressive for a nonemergency project.

To be sure, the controversy surrounding the arch was already messy. For one thing, there’s an ongoing lawsuit that may very well succeed. For another, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently told Congress that the project is only at the “discussion” stage, and when evidence to the contrary emerged, Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, argued that the Cabinet secretary came “pretty damn close” to committing perjury.

In case that weren’t quite enough, the Washington Post reported last month that the administration was moving forward with plans to start work on the arch “by piggybacking on an existing, unrelated contract for engineering services” a mile away, which in turn would “allow the administration to bypass a potentially lengthy public bidding process.”

As a rule, when a White House has to rely on subterfuge to advance its ambitions, it’s a bad sign.

At this point, common sense might suggest that Congress would intervene, but the White House has already made clear that it intends to circumvent lawmakers. Trump was quite explicit on this point a few weeks ago, declaring at an Oval Office event, “We don’t need Congress to sign off on it. We’re doing it.”

But now that the details of the administration’s plan are coming into focus, the controversy has taken an even more farcical turn. Indeed, Trump and his team don’t just want an arch; they want it to be built at extraordinary speed, as if there were some kind of emergency need for the project. (There is not.)

The Post’s report added, “The arch also would be built with concrete clad in granite, unlike the nearby Lincoln Memorial and other monuments that were constructed with natural stone like marble and limestone — another way to expedite its construction, experts said.”

Maybe the president wants to see the arch in place before the end of his second term for ego purposes; maybe he’s worried that if he doesn’t rush, his successor might pull the plug on the boondoggle. Either way, the fast-track process is tough to defend.

Looking ahead, however, there’s another element to this that’s worth keeping in mind: safety.

Those familiar with the geography of the nation’s capital might realize that there’s a large airport in Arlington, just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., and that the flight path for many arrivals takes airplanes above where the proposed arch would sit.

With this in mind, the Post went on to report, “The Park Service said the project would require large cranes, including one that may be 320 feet tall and another that could be as high as 300 feet. The planned site for the arch is on a flight path to nearby Reagan National Airport, where planes can sometimes fly at around 500 feet of altitude, raising concerns about safety.”

Congressional Democrats have made no effort to hide their efforts to block the project, and if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterm elections, this would likely be one of many points of contention next year. Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post To build his ‘triumphal’ arch, Trump envisions 20 hours per day of construction appeared first on MS NOW.

Headed into this week, analysts expected to see another surge in inflation, and on Wednesday morning, those projections proved true: The consumer price index climbed to its highest level since April 2023, and inflation continued to outpace wage growth, exacerbating the affordability crisis.

The data left the White House not only with a policy challenge but also with a political one. How would Donald Trump and his team try again to convince the American public that the unpopular and unnecessary war in Iran is worth the economic sacrifice?

As it turned out, the president decided not to even make the effort. Instead, when asked for his reaction to the latest discouraging news, the Republican said the latest inflation data was “great,” adding, “I love the inflation.”

Reporter: Are you concerned, Mr. President, about the latest inflation number which came out this morning?Trump: No, I love it. I love the inflation.

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2026-06-10T16:09:56.011Z

He later told The New York Post about the point he was trying to convey. “The numbers are going to be phenomenal because what’s showing is that despite the fact that we’re in a war, the numbers are much lower than anticipated, and when we’re out of that war, the numbers will be at lower numbers than they were even before it started,” the president said.

There were substantive problems with the defense — there’s no evidence to suggest that the “anticipated” inflation hike was even worse than the status quo, for example — coupled with the fact that Trump noticeably failed to provide this context when he was talking to the White House press corps, on the record and on camera. (The number of people who will see the “I love the inflation” clip will far outnumber those who see the New York Post’s article.)

But just as notable is the recent history. In fact, it was only four weeks ago when a reporter asked Trump, “When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are American financial situations motivating you to make a deal?”

Without hesitating, the president replied, “Not even a little bit.” The Republican added that, as part of his focus on preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

It was a brutal quote, not only because of its callousness, but also because Trump has spent so much time proving the underlying point true. As my MS NOW colleague Zeeshan Aleem added, “The truth, in this case, is that Trump obviously doesn’t care about ordinary Americans’ financial well-being. It’s sticky not just because he said it, but because he has long been acting like it.”

Nearly a month later, all of this has returned to the fore, not just because of the data, which paints an ugly picture, and not just because of the administration’s misguided policies, which are directly responsible for making the cost of living worse, but also because of the frequency with which the president expresses his public indifference.

The latest Economist/YouGov poll found that just 29% of the public approve of his handling of the economy — 10 points lower than Joe Biden’s worst poll on the same issue. With the midterm elections just 21 weeks away, it’s a number that will likely generate understandable panic among Republican officials and candidates.

But it’s not the only survey of interest. A recent Fox News poll asked respondents, “Do you think Donald Trump cares about people like you, or not?” Only 37% of Americans said they believe the president does in fact care about people like them.

There’s no reason to assume that number can’t sink lower.

The post ‘I love the inflation’: What makes Trump’s comments on the affordability crisis different appeared first on MS NOW.

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* The latest from Northern Ireland: “The family of a man who lost an eye in a knife attack appealed for ​calm on Wednesday after the incident triggered a wave of anti-immigrant violence in Belfast overnight, with masked men burning families out of their homes and torching vehicles. The appeal ‌came as a Sudanese man appeared in court charged with attempted murder and as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and politicians in Northern Ireland condemned the violence by ‘masked thugs’ that had targeted ethnic minorities.”

* In related news: “The British government hit out at X owner Elon Musk Wednesday, accusing him of whipping up tensions online ahead of disorder in Belfast.”

* The tenuous state of a dubious ceasefire: “Trump said the U.S. is going to hit Iran ‘hard’ today when pressed by reporters in the Oval Office about his statement earlier that Tehran will ‘pay the price’ for taking ‘too long’ to reach a peace agreement. ‘Well, we’re going to be attacking them and attacking them very hard, resuming bombing,’ he said.”

* The latest casualty figures from Lebanon: “Israel’s military offensive in Lebanon has killed at least 3,666 people, including 131 healthcare workers, and injured more than 11,300 since the U.S. and Israel began their war with Iran in late February, the Lebanese health ministry reported yesterday.”

* The changing nature of modern warfare: “Ukraine is wreaking havoc on unarmored trucks and trains in the battlefield’s rear, using drones with upgraded engines and batteries, integrated Starlink communication systems and new artificial-intelligence capabilities. The ramped-up attacks are causing fuel shortages, complicating troop rotations and reducing Russian military activity on the front.”

* This seems like a reasonable request: “Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee demanded Wednesday that Bill Pulte, President Donald Trump’s controversial pick for acting director of national intelligence, submit to a full security check before assuming the post, including an examination of his financial holdings and foreign contacts.”

* Some market trends can’t be stopped despite the White House’s best efforts: “Even as President Donald Trump boosts coal over clean energy, solar power is hitting new milestones in the U.S. and remains the leading source of new power. Data released Wednesday by global energy think tank Ember, along with a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie, show the continued growth of solar and decline of coal in the United States despite federal policy. In May, for the first time, solar supplied more of the nation’s electricity than coal, or 12.8%, Ember said.”

* A bizarre schedule for a nonemergency vanity project: “Federal officials are laying more groundwork to begin construction on President Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot-tall triumphal arch, sharing additional documents that detail the project’s scope and an aggressive timetable for potentially completing work before Trump’s term ends. According to National Park Service documents posted this month, the administration envisions 20 hours per day of construction on the arch, year-round, in hopes of completing the project within two to three years.”

See you tomorrow.

The post Wednesday’s Mini-Report, 6.10.26 appeared first on MS NOW.