With just 95 days until the midterm elections, Donald Trump's poll numbers hit an all-time low this week. The president responded by spending the days lurching from a blocked attorney general nomination to a bizarre cabinet meeting performance, a baseless cyberattack accusation and an abrupt reversal on military technology for Ukraine.
The week followed a wave of backlash over his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner, condemned as disastrous, racist and cruel, and included an unusual eulogy at the funeral of Lindsey Graham, one of the most useful allies he had left.
Camp David and the five missiles
Trump and his cabinet decamped to Camp David on Thursday for the same roundtable routine as every cabinet meeting, this time in a log cabin. The president was in a strange mood, telling a rambling anecdote about US forces shooting down Iranian missiles fired at Jordan.
"The other day you read that 5 missiles were shot," he said. "They were going 8,600 miles an hour. Think of it, eight thousand, six hundred. Now a car, if you go 60, it gets to be a little faster if you go 100. 8,600 miles an hour, and they were big missiles and they were shot at Jordan."
"And our guys were there, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Five. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Right?" Perhaps realising he was talking gibberish, he added: "I don't want to be Biden. I have to be very careful. That woulda been a great soundbite."
No talk of selling the World Cup
Trump was asked whether he had spoken to FIFA president Gianni Infantino about his plan to sell off the World Cup. The question was not unreasonable: the two have been close for weeks, watched the World Cup final together, and Infantino has been on a charm offensive that culminated in a made-up "peace prize."
Infantino's plan involves spinning off the tournament's commercial operations into a new $20 billion subsidiary, 20% owned by private investors. The core investor would be a New York investment firm created by Joshua Kushner, brother of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
"No, I never spoke to him about it," Trump insisted. He did say the two discussed Infantino possibly becoming the Secretary General of the UN - but not the World Cup plan.
Trump and Hannity at Graham's funeral
With the death of Lindsey Graham, Trump lost one of his closest friends in politics, though the two hated each other at first. Before Graham was laid to rest, there was an awkward moment between the president and Fox News host Sean Hannity over the late senator's legacy.
Trump, in his eulogy, said Graham "never saw a war he didn't like." Hannity, speaking after Trump, contradicted the president, saying Graham's reputation as a "warmonger" had been overstated: "I've heard that false criticism a lot. It's not true. The truth was the opposite. Lindsey desperately wanted and talked to the president about a lasting peace in the Middle East. He wanted every region, every country in the region on that path to peace. That was Lindsey's dream, if people would only listen to what he had been saying."
Hannity also spent an unusual amount of time praising Trump at the funeral: "Lindsey, Mr. President, probably has a heavenly version of Mar-a-Lago. It may even be a little bigger. He may have a little more gold in the Oval Office in his mansion in heaven. And I wouldn't be surprised if he added one big beautiful ballroom and an arch somewhere on the property, because he would want to, obviously, duplicate his dearest friend in life, you, Mr. President."
Blanche confirmation dead until January
It became clear this week that Trump has almost no chance of getting Todd Blanche confirmed as his permanent attorney general before the midterms, and it will almost certainly get harder after that. For now, Blanche is set to serve as acting attorney general for a while longer. The vote, due Thursday, was scuppered by two Republican holdouts on the Senate Judiciary Committee: John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
Both men leave office in January and have fallen out with Trump. Cornyn was defeated in a primary after Trump backed his challenger, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Tillis chose not to seek re-election after publicly breaking with Trump. The two lame ducks are opposing Blanche over his involvement in and refusal to roll back Trump's settlement with the Internal Revenue Service.
The settlement came after Trump sued a branch of his own government and, despite being on both sides of the case, settled out of court. It had two parts: a "slush fund" to pay damages to people "wronged" by the government - mainly January 6th rioters - and a deal making Trump and his family immune from being audited by the taxman over historic claims of underpayment allegedly worth millions. The slush fund was walked back after a backlash, but the IRS deal stayed in place. Trump admitted he will not get the nomination through while the pair are still sitting, vowing on Truth Social to bring it back once they leave office in January.
The slush fund that died
Trump is still complaining about the collapse of his plan to pay millions to people willing to mount a violent coup to keep him in office. On Truth Social he said "victims" of "weaponisation" should be paid back. Asked about the post, he said: "I'm talking about the weaponisation against large numbers of people in our country by the Biden administration, and by Obama, but by the Biden administration in particular in this case. Large numbers of people their lives have been ruined, they've been destroyed...they've gone to prison for no reason whatsoever. There's never been a group of people ...I can think of a couple that have been treated pretty badly, groups...but there's essentially never been a group of people treated so badly as these people."
He went on: "And there's this fund, this fund was not for me, this fund was for the people who have been weaponised, that have been abused. Now...I was abused. They attacked my house, Mar A Lago, where I live. And big damages should have been given to me. I don't want anything, I'm not talking about myself."
No innocent journey
"I think there's a big group of people in this country, history will show, that have been treated like nobody else has ever been treated. So badly. So horribly. Their families have been ruined. Many, many suicides. People that were very successful that wanted to go to a rally, or an event...and ended up spending the rest of their lives in horror."
To be clear, the "rally" or "event" he is talking about was the violent attempted coup on January 6th, 2021. The "very successful" people include members of racist militias including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and they ended up in prison because they tried to forcibly overthrow the government, in many cases assaulting more than 140 police officers. Asked if he still wanted the fund to go ahead, Trump said: "It's dead, but I wish it weren't....I'd like to see them compensated for the pain...they went down for an innocent journey..."
Blame it on Minnesota
Cyberattacks targeted more than 30 water systems in Minnesota and six other states on Sunday and Monday. Most people, including US and state officials, think Iranian hackers were behind the attack. Trump is not so sure.
At the Cabinet meeting he said: "I think that Minnesota is behind it. You know who's behind it? Minnesota. Because they're grossly incompetent. I think the governor is behind it. I don't think there was an Iranian cyber attack."
He offered no evidence for blaming Minnesota, including Governor Tim Walz in particular, who has been at odds with the White House on immigration enforcement and other issues. Asked for evidence to support Trump's allegations, the White House referred to his comments at the Cabinet meeting.
Ukraine's Patriot licence walk-back
Two weeks ago, at the NATO summit in Turkey, Trump met Volodymyr Zelensky and said he had agreed to grant a licence to manufacture Patriot missile interceptors to help Ukraine defend against Russian bombardment.
"One of the things we're going to be talking about is, we're going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That's pretty cool, right?", Trump said to Zelensky in Ankara.
This week he reversed course. In an Oval Office Q&A on Wednesday he said: "You have to be very judicious, but you have to be very careful. Now we have not agreed to that. We're talking about it, but it's a hard thing to give away that kind of technology. And I don't think this would ever happen but, you know, there's people that you give that technology, they can someday turn on you." At the Cabinet meeting, he repeated the walk-back: "You look at war, that's happened a couple of times over the years, right? So we have to be very careful."
Fauci takes the fifth 111 times
Republicans in Congress who organised a hearing for former health chief Dr Anthony Fauci were left fuming as Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence in response to every question - 111 times - even though he had been pre-emptively pardoned by Joe Biden, who predicted they would try this.
Senator after senator ranted at Fauci, suggesting his refusal to answer indicated guilt in one conspiracy theory or another. But in 2022, Donald Trump took the Fifth no fewer than 440 times during a deposition investigating the finances of the Trump Organisation.
Gaza: the Board of Peace's surprise announcement
Many people woke up baffled by Trump's announcement that his "Board of Peace" had somehow talked Hamas into laying down its weapons to pave the way for the end of the war in Gaza.
Hamas officials said the group has agreed to the disarmament agreement. Israel has not commented. The Board of Peace, Trump's bizarro United Nations, will apparently have a major role in overseeing the deal's implementation, supposedly brokered with the help of Qatar, which gifted Trump a free jumbo jet a few months ago, and Turkey. This one is filed under "believe it when we see it."
