White House Is in Full Panic Mode as Trump Doubles Down on Iran War

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles summoned dozens of Republican political consultants from across the country for a meeting Monday at the Waldorf Astoria, a person familiar with the plan told Politico’s Playbook.

The gathering of Republican operatives comes as the White House is developing its strategy and aligning the broader party apparatus to face November’s midterm elections amid Donald Trump’s rather unpopular “excursion” to the Middle East.

Former deputy chief of staff James Blair, who departed the White House earlier this month in order to run the president’s political operation, was also involved in organizing the meeting at the Waldorf.

“Taken together, the sessions underscore growing urgency inside the White House about the midterms and concerns around energy prices and cost of living exacerbated by the Iran war,” Politico reported.

Trump’s overall approval rating has hit a new low of just 37 percent, according to an NBC News poll Monday. Two-thirds of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of inflation and the Iran conflict, which has upended global trade and sent energy prices skyrocketing.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright admitted Sunday that gas prices may not come back down until next year, leaving Republicans in a tough spot when it comes to seeking reelection in November. It seems that strategists in the White House are aware that there’s only so much spin they can do.

“The rhetoric around this stuff matters way less than the reality,” one person close to the White House told Politico’s Dasha Burns Monday. “It either will be or it won’t be. If we don’t see the $3 gallon of gas, we’re gonna get killed.”

Republicans are fighting over expelling some of their own members of Congress.

Representative Cory Mills, under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations of assaulting women, soliciting sex workers, lying about his military service, and profiting from federal contracts as a member of Congress, has drafted a resolution to expel his colleague, Representative Nancy Mace, from Congress after she tried to expel him and three other members of Congress last week.

A source told NOTUS, which first reported the news, that the resolution would highlight an incident at Charleston International Airport in South Carolina, last year, in which Mace yelled at TSA agents and security officers, calling them “fucking incompetent.”

The resolution could bring up any other number of Mace’s scandals. The South Carolina representative is also facing her own House Ethics Committee investigation over allegations that she collected $12,000 in congressional reimbursement funds that she wasn’t eligible for, and ordered her staff to buy her alcohol late at night, clean her house, and promote her on forums as one of the “hottest women in Congress.”

The congresswoman took to X after news of Mills’s resolution broke, posting that he “lied about his military service, has been accused of beating women, has a restraining order against him, and has allegedly been stuffing his own pockets with federal contracts while sitting in Congress. As a survivor, I will always stand up and right the wrongs of others. He is only coming after me because he knows he’s next.”

Mace last week also targeted Democrat Eric Swalwell and Republican Tony Gonzalez, who ended up resigning rather than face expulsion resolutions from Congress. Swalwell faced numerous allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, while Gonzalez sent sexually explicit messages to two aides and had an affair with one who later committed suicide.

The fourth representative in Mace’s crosshairs is Democratic Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who faces an expulsion vote this week over allegedly misusing Federal Emergency Management Agency funds.

For now, the infighting in the Republican caucus undermines their already razor-thin control of the House and makes it appear that petty squabbling is taking precedence over serious ethical issues.

The man who just committed the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. in the past two years had a previous weapons conviction—so how did he get his hands on another gun?

Shamar Elkins, a 31-year-old father, shot and killed his seven children and their cousin Sunday in Shreveport, Louisiana. The victims’ ages ranged from three to 11, CNN reported. He also critically injured two women: his wife and the mother of the eighth child.

But in March 2019, three years after he finished a seven-year stint in the Louisiana Army National Guard, Elkins was arrested for firing a 9-millimeter handgun 300 feet away from the fence line of a school where children were playing outside, KTBS reported.

Elkins was charged with illegal use of weapons and carrying a firearm on school property. He pleaded guilty to the illegal weapons charge, and the second, more serious charge was dismissed. Elkins was placed on probation for 18 months but walked away without a permanent firearms ban.

Elkins was also charged with driving while intoxicated in 2016, CNN reported.

The state of Louisiana has a 10-year ban on firearm possession after certain felonies—crimes of violence, sex crimes, drug crimes, burglaries, for example—but not all felonies. The crime to which Elkins pleaded guilty sat beneath this legal threshold.

Because Elkins’s 2019 conviction for illegal weapons use only resulted in probation, his record fell short of the legal threshold for a permanent firearms ban under U.S. federal law, according to the International Business Times. Elkins was able to legally own a firearm again after his probation ended.

Republican Representative Chip Roy is taking aim at free speech and freedom of religion, introducing a bill that would target immigrants who support “socialism, communism, Chinese communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”  

Roy calls his assault on the First Amendment to the Constitution the “MAMDANI Act,” after New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who was elected last year on a platform of democratic socialism. The legislation would make any “alien” who supports or has supported those ideologies “inadmissible, deportable, denaturalizable, and ineligible for naturalization.”

“By targeting the Red-Green Alliance, this legislation deploys new tools to fight back against the Marxist and Islamist advance that has devastated Europe and has now arrived on our doorstep, especially in my home state of Texas,” Roy told Breitbart. 

His office reportedly provided the right-wing website with a one-page summary of the bill, which cites “the very presence of Zohran Mamdani and those like him who champion Marxist ideologies” as enabling “the mass importation of Marxists and Islamists.”

Roy, who is running for Texas attorney general, has a long history of bigotry against Muslims. Late last month, Roy posted “No more Muslims” on X, drawing backlash from Muslims throughout his state. He has vocally opposed the East Plano Islamic Center’s planned housing development in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, joining other Texas Republicans who warn of a “Sharia law” conspiracy. 

With Republicans having an ever-narrowing majority in the House, the bill is likely just symbolic, but it still shows the level of bigotry and Islamophobia present in the Republican Party and in Texas, even though the state has an estimated 400,000 Muslim residents. Roy will likely face zero consequences for his prejudices, as Republicans are increasingly embracing bigoted conspiracies and opposing constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a new religious rights case that could challenge a landmark 1990 decision.

Parents within the Catholic Archdiocese of Denver, which runs 34 preschools across Colorado’s capital city, have challenged a state mandate requiring church-affiliated preschools to admit children of same-sex couples in order to receive public funds. The church has claimed that the law oversteps its First Amendment rights, as it does not recognize same-sex relationships or transgender identities.

The legal precedent at stake was set during Employment Division v. Smith, in which the high court ruled that Oregon could deny unemployment benefits to a Native American fired for using peyote (a hallucinogenic plant illegal in the state), even though it was used for religious purposes.

Three of the court’s conservative justices have already said that the 1990 decision should be overturned, The Hill reported. The Supreme Court declined to directly take up that question, but is reportedly open to narrowing the precedent set nearly four decades ago.

Colorado’s mandate requires that preschools ensure “an equal opportunity to enroll and receive preschool services regardless of race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, lack of housing, income level, or disability.”

“The rulings below give hostile states a playbook for leveraging their vast and growing government funding programs to pressure religious schools and other ministries to abandon their religious practices or else be excluded from the arena,” the archdiocese’s lawyers at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty wrote in court filings.

The Trump administration has already chimed in. Without hearing the preschools’ challenge, the admin filed an amicus brief in support of the church, urging the nation’s highest judiciary to take up the case. Trump officials wrote that the U.S. government holds a “substantial interest in the preservation of the free exercise of religion” and in the “enforcement of rules prohibiting discrimination by government funding recipients.”

It’s at least the second instance in which the ultraconservative Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to Colorado’s LGBTQ protections since Donald Trump returned to office. In March, the judiciary sided with a therapist who claimed that the state’s conversion therapy ban discriminated against her based on her views.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter, and wrote at the time that the majority’s opinion “could be ushering in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care administered by effectively unsupervised healthcare providers.”