“The lack of public comment after the Situation Room talks on Friday, despite Trump suggesting earlier an agreement was near, was the latest conflicting signal from Washington over the prospects for a deal with Tehran as the conflict drags into its fourth month.”

The latest episode of Trial Balloon is live.

When American politics stops trying to persuade and starts trying to destroy.

“Johnson bought himself time this spring by punting a series of politically difficult fights. But those deadlines are now coming due, setting up a brutal June for House Republicans.”

“Aside from MAGA Republicans, Americans are bunched at the upper left, with few people seeing the economy getting better and the vast majority seeing it as getting worse. Non-MAGA Republicans are much more similar in their views to independents, and even to Democrats, than they are to MAGA.”

“So how big is the group that believes that we have a good economy? Only 19 percent of Americans.”

“Friday’s report, written by the president’s physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, gave a similarly upbeat assessment of Mr. Trump’s health, declaring that the 79-year-old president ‘remains in excellent health, demonstrating strong cardiac, pulmonary, neurological, and overall physical function.’”

Washington Post: “Barbabella’s report once again suggested that Trump’s frequent handshaking and use of aspirin were behind the bruising, though some outside physicians have suggested that is unlikely, noting that the bruises have appeared on Trump’s nondominant left hand.”

Wall Street Journal: “The president weighed 238 pounds, 14 pounds more since his 2025 exam.”

“Mr. Trump has long conducted running focus groups on his closest aides, and appears to enjoy needling them and keeping them off balance as a way of asserting his dominance. Several people in the president’s inner circle have been subject to his quasi-public questioning of their performance and their future.”

“The initiative underscores the president’s ability to reshape immigration policy through executive orders and the vast power of federal regulations while sidestepping Congress. And it shows how the administration has pursued more creative — and lower-profile — tactics after Mr. Trump’s militarized deportation raids into major cities prompted political backlash earlier this year.”

“Mr. Trump had said that the $1 billion project, the priciest presidential library yet, could include a hotel and retail sales outlets. But more disturbing to historians and government watchdogs is his determination to own and control every document a presidential library would contain. Not since the Watergate era, when President Richard M. Nixon took his fight to control the incriminating White House tapes to the Supreme Court, has a president worked so hard to shield documentary evidence of his administration’s inner workings from public view.”

Trump wrote that unless he was free to decide the center’s trajectory, he had “no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey.”

“More than a dozen Republican senators have privately urged top Trump aides to drop the fund since its creation last week, said people familiar with the outreach, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is usually supportive of the president’s efforts.”

“Administration officials have grown increasingly concerned about the viability of the fund, people familiar with the matter said, which had been expected to provide payouts to an array of Trump allies.”

The ruling by the judge, Kathleen Williams, was a significant blow both to Mr. Trump, who had voluntarily dismissed the suit last week, and to the Justice Department.

“The military searches using underwater drones, water robots and manned and unmanned aircraft have found some objects that could be mines, but none have been definitively identified.”

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“A New York Times review of securities filings from nearly 500 companies showed that they avoided taxes by attributing hundreds of billions of dollars in earnings to low- or no-tax foreign locales like Cyprus, Bermuda, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Often, corporations funneled the profits through subsidiaries in places where they had no employees, offices or customers.”

“The maths tend to be simple addition or division. Yet the calculations matter: the flourishing of the civilization whose multiplanetary future preoccupies Mr Musk requires a healthy politics, much as his own companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, counted on far-sighted government subsidies and contracts, not to mention the principled rule of law, to succeed.”

“But unlike the other fields Mr Musk has shaped, his contribution to this bulwark of civilization is to make it not more imaginative and optimistic but more atavistic and fearful, and just plain dumber.”

“In politics, in contrast to other industries, Mr Musk has not chosen the path of revolutionary entrepreneurship.”

Almost a third of Sen. John Cornyn’s runoff voters say that they will vote for Talarico in November.