🔥 THE RIFT WITH NETANYAHU BREAKS OPEN
The two men who started this war together no longer agree on how to end it. Sunday night, Benjamin Netanyahu moved to blow up Trump’s peace deal — Israel hit Beirut’s southern suburbs, a petrochemical plant in Iran’s southwest, and a line of military targets, and Iran answered with missile barrages, the worst exchange since the April truce, on the war’s 100th day. Trump called Netanyahu and ordered him to stand down — and to take the Iranian salvo without firing back. An American president just told the world the United States will absorb Iranian missiles and do nothing, a thing Washington would never have swallowed a year ago. Netanyahu wants to keep pounding Iran until the regime breaks; Trump wants out, because the war is bleeding his poll numbers and his own voters have turned against it. So Trump sided with Tehran over his closest ally, and the rift between the two men cracked open. Israel still wants to prosecute the war; Trump says no. The no is the tell on how weak he has become, but it makes clear what has been evident up until now. Netanyahu is willing to risk the US relationship with Israel, in exchange for an ongoing war with Iran.
🎙️ AT HOME, THE WEAKNESS COMES OUT AS RAGE
That same weakness has a louder face at home. Kristen Welker only had to ask Trump about his $1.8 billion fund to pay the people who stormed the Capitol — and he insisted the rioters “lost everything,” that FBI agents “ushered them into the building,” that the 2020 election “was rigged.” Welker told him he had no evidence. Trump called her crooked, called her stupid, and walked off his own interview. A president sure of his ground answers the question; this one fled it, still defending January 6, still selling a stolen election five years gone. The rage isn’t an act — it’s what’s left when the facts run out.
🗳️ THE CANDIDATE NOBODY CAN SINK
Graham Platner keeps generating scandals, and Maine Democrats keep not caring. The oyster farmer turned Senate frontrunner has survived a tattoo critics likened to a Nazi insignia, a trail of old inflammatory posts, and now his own wife flagging the explicit texts he sent other women — and he still leads Susan Collins 48 to 43 heading into Tuesday’s primary. Janet Mills, the establishment’s recruit, quit in April for lack of cash and left him the lane. Tomorrow, Maine decides whether the Bernie-backed harbormaster his own party keeps trying to disown is the one who finally beats Collins.
🕵️ THE SPY LAW DIES FRIDAY — OVER PULTE
The government’s warrantless-spying power runs out Friday, and the Senate just let it happen. Early Friday seven Republicans — Josh Hawley, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul among them — joined Democrats to block reauthorization of Section 702, 47 to 52, balking at Trump’s choice of his attack dog Bill Pulte to run the spy agencies and sign the surveillance certifications. Unless Trump’s own party reverses itself this week, Washington’s most powerful surveillance tool goes dark on June 12 — killed not by privacy activists but by senators who don’t trust the man now holding it.
🎥 HUNTER BIDEN COMES BACK SWINGING
Hunter Biden sat down Saturday with Lev Parnas and Dean Blundell and pointed across the table at Parnas as the man who flew to Ukraine and Austria to build the “laptop” — sourced, Hunter said, from Kremlin-linked oligarch Dmytro Firtash and sanctioned agent Andrii Derkach, months before the Delaware repair-shop story ever surfaced. The man the smear machine was built to destroy walked back onto the national stage and named the operatives he says ran it.
🎭 ALSO LAST NIGHT — Broadway crowned Schmigadoon! Best Musical and Liberation Best Play, while Death of a Salesman took six Tonys; in a week of real wars, the stage picked a parody of small-town nostalgia.
🎯 THE PATTERN
When you have to publicly distance yourself from an ally in order to get a bad peace deal with your enemy, you are not winning. By launching its attack on Israel, Tehran exposed two realities: how weak the United States is in the region, and a rift between the two allies who launched the war against it. What should concern Israelis the most is that by launching this senseless and expensive war, their leader Bibi Netanyahu is revealing his antipathy towards America and its people. It may ultimately cost Israel its true democratic partner in the world, and that may well be the death knell for democracy in the entire region.
....Kristen Welker is a nice person...though I have never been a fan of her interviews, she rarely if ever follows up with the hard questions to hold the person's feet to the fire that's sitting across the table....
....but on her interview with the criminal commander in chief...she would not let him off the hook by repeatedly asking where's the proof to his repeated lies....and by doing so, the bloated, pedo, rapist, 34x convicted felon couldn't handle the truth and turned red as a beet, nearly blew a blood vessel, ripped of his mic and touched her...not before calling Welker crooked and stupid along with every major news outlet....even the ones he now controls.....
.... I have to give her credit for that....this time she wouldn't let the BS of the most disgusting person on the planet slide.....well done !