Trump Declares There Are “No Limits” to His Power

Now that President Donald Trump has signed an agreement with Iran that caves on many of his initial demands, you would be forgiven for hoping he’s learned a valuable lesson.

Trump’s main takeaway? There are “no limits” to his power, as he declared on “The Axios Show” on Thursday.

Never mind that he went in with the goal of “unconditional surrender,” and left with a memorandum of understanding that provides a $300 billion fund for Iran’s reconstruction and opens the door to ending sanctions, in return for no real limits on Iran’s nuclear program.

Axios’s Marc Caputo asked the president whether he learned there are limits to his power after the war.

“I haven’t learned that lesson yet,” Trump replied. “I know there are, but there are no limits. We defeated them totally militarily.”

To Trump, his power is comparable to conquerors and dictators of history, according to a new book from The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. In the book, Trump shows off a document that argues he’s more powerful than Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler.

“They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around,” Trump said of Alexander the Great, the Caesars, and William the Conqueror, according to the authors.

Grimly, Trump also seemed to take “evident pleasure” in “the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin.”

Trump also posted the document on Truth Social on Thursday. Whether comparing himself to Genghis Khan or saying he’s “the boss” of other G7 leaders, it’s clear that Trump sees power as the ability to submit other nations to your will.

Vice President JD Vance’s weird attempt to be woke just made it clear how little he thinks of working class people.

In an interview published Thursday, The New York Times’s Ross Douthat cornered Vance about how the Trump administration’s tone of “aggressive uncharity” contrasts with its purported brand of Christian politics.

Vance immediately started flailing, calling the interviewer’s claim “fundamentally unfalsifiable.” The vice president argued that there were plenty of “clips” of administration officials that would read as Christian or un-Christian, shamelessly plugged his new book, and then pivoted to something even more surprising.

“The tone argument is in some ways, I think, people see what they want to see. I also think that tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working-class ways of communication and covering them in elite preferences,” Vance said.

If that argument sounds a little “woke” for Vance, that’s because tone policing is most often used to prevent marginalized individuals and groups from sharing their experiences. The term typically refers to policing emotional language—not overt cruelty.

Vance suggested that if he was coming across as uncharitable, that was because he was speaking for a working class that was totally onboard with it. How little he must think of working class people to imagine that they’d co-sign gutting social programs and shuttering humanitarian aid. Not to mention all of the wildly un-Christian things Vance himself has said, including making up racist lies, defending an unjust war, and hating thy neighbor.

But it should come as no surprise that the “tone” of an administration headed by a billionaire is not representative of the working class. Rather, it represents the elite.

At the opening of his presidential center in Chicago Thursday, former President Barack Obama did not shy away from criticizing Donald Trump.

While he did not mention him by name, Obama criticized Trump throughout the speech. He noted that the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was coming up, and that it emphasized that “we are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. And that in the newly independent United States, there will be no kings or lords, no serfs or subjects, but only citizens,” perhaps alluding to the “No Kings” protests or Trump’s constant referral to himself as king.*

Obama pointed out that the exhibits in the presidential museum “focus not just on policies, but on the shared values that make democracy possible. A belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and that no one is above the law or beneath its protection.”

The former president then listed several principles outlined in the Constitution that Trump has flouted throughout his time in the Oval Office.

“A belief in checks and balances in our government and an accountability that comes with it. An independent judiciary and a robust free press. A belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution,” Obama said. “A belief in the peaceful transfer of power after the people have spoken in fair and free elections, recognizing that in a large, complicated society like ours, no group or faction gets its way 100 percent of the time.”

Obama pointedly highlighted Republicans hated by Trump who also believed in these values.

“These are the values and traditions I believe in. And they are not Republican or Democratic values. They are American values we can all share regardless of party. Values every president here today, as different as we are, has tried our best to uphold. Values that John McCain and Mitt Romney believed in no less than I did,” Obama said.

Obama praised one of the biggest acts of defiance against Trump so far in the latter’s second presidential term: The local resistance opposing ICE and Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. He said that “those ordinary people in the Twin Cities who braved frigid temperatures, risked their own safety, standing shoulder to shoulder to look out for their neighbors and sometimes look out for strangers because they knew that was the right thing to do” were among the best of America.

Trump wasn’t invited to the opening of the presidential center, although Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett said he is welcome to visit in the future. Thursday’s event was a reminder that at one time, presidents used to speak about America’s unifying values.

Watch Obama’s full remarks here:

* This article originally mistranscribed Obama’s speech.

President Donald Trump won’t stop ranting about the stock market amid backlash to his disastrous peace deal with Iran.

“These fools, who think I haven’t been tough enough on Iran, when the Stock Market Just Hit A RECORD HIGH, and Oil prices are ‘tumbling’ down, are either jealous, bad people, or stupid,” Trump wrote on Truth Social early Thursday morning.

But that was only the beginning: Trump proceeded to post multiple times railing against his critics, pointing to the stock market and oil prices as proof of his masterful deal making.

“Markets are loving what is happening with Oil Prices way down, and Stocks way up,” Trump wrote in one post. “All there is for the U.S. is Success, Lower Oil Prices, and Victory. Check out the Stock Market,” he wrote in another. “THE STOCK MARKETS ARE ROARING,” he wrote in yet another missive.

After Trump signed the peace deal with Iran, Wall Street jumped one percent Wednesday, and stocks have continued to rise despite Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s decision to hold interest rates steady. Oil prices dropped to their lowest prices since the war began. Trump gloats about these changes as if he expects us to forget how they got that way in the first place.

But Trump’s peace deal won’t solve the country’s oil issues overnight, especially after the months-long closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatened to take the U.S. oil supply into the danger zone.

Even if some things are bouncing back, that still wouldn’t take away from the fact that Iran is in a stronger position now than it was before the war, and the United States is slowly crawling back to where it started.

President Trump’s reflecting pool woes are growing. 

Days after the water in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turned green from algae, the recently applied blue paint is now peeling off the bottom of the pool. 

Meanwhile, the current algae bloom in the pool is the biggest amount recorded in the month of June in at least five years, according to The Washington Post. 

The president personally requested “American flag blue” paint in his $14 million renovation of the pool, which didn’t go through a required bidding process and was instead awarded to a company with no federal contracting experience who is overcharging the government.  

Any outdoor pool of untreated water is prone to growing algae, and crews were seen Tuesday dumping hydrogen peroxide into the water in a hasty attempt to kill the aquatic plant. There’s one problem with that: Hydrogen peroxide also serves as a paint remover. So in trying to (ineffectively) kill the algae, Trump also ruined his new paint job and created a potential hazard to local birds such as ducks. 

A close-up photograph of the pool workers’ equipment revealed that they were using a 12 percent hydrogen peroxide concentrate, which can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Trump administration blames residual material in supply lines for the growing algae problem. The Interior Department, which is in charge of the pool, said it was using hydrogen peroxide and “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” to treat the outbreak.

But not only has the hydrogen peroxide failed to get rid of the algae, it has caused the blue paint to peel and raised phosphate levels in the pool “far higher than what is recommended to keep algae at bay,” according to CNN, which tested the pool’s water with the help of a swimming pool store. The whole project is now attracting attention for all of the wrong reasons, and it may look even worse than before by the time the America250 celebration takes place on July 4.