The Daily Wrap Up

25 June, 2026

Trump meets with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte at Oval Office. Photo Credit: CBS News

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

Yesterday, Donald met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office ahead of next month’s NATO summit. The meeting was supposed to focus on the future of the alliance, defense spending, the war with Iran, and the growing tensions between the United States and its European allies. Those tensions, of course, are not the product of unavoidable geopolitical realities. They are tensions Donald has deliberately created through years of antagonizing America’s closest allies while rewarding authoritarian leaders.

After the meeting, the two men took questions from reporters. Unsurprisingly, Donald used the opportunity to revisit many of his favorite grievances, once again portraying America’s allies as freeloaders who have somehow taken advantage of him personally rather than longstanding partners in one of the most successful military alliances in modern history.

Donald: I was disappointed. I was disappointed with Italy. I was disappointed with the UK. He’s now gone and he had a lot of problems, but we were disappointed with the UK. We were disappointed with Germany and France. We’re disappointed with most of them. Spain is a horror show. Spain is terrible even from your standpoint. I mean, they don’t want to pay anything. They think they’re in for a free ride. Spain is not a good group, not a good group at all.

I always find it remarkable to hear Donald complain about other people getting a free ride while he continues living rent free in a house maintained at taxpayer expense as he simultaneously grifts billions of dollars from the American people.

The real reason Donald dislikes so many of our allies is much simpler. Their leaders have, at one time or another, refused to agree with him completely. Some have challenged his disastrous ideas about NATO. Others have simply refused to indulge his ego. To Donald, disagreement is betrayal. There is no room in his worldview for independent allies because he does not understand what an alliance actually is.

He was later asked what, specifically, he wanted America’s NATO partners to do that they were not already doing.

Donald: I just want their loyalty. We don’t need their money. We don’t need anything. We have the most powerful military in the world by far, but I just want loyalty. We’re so loyal to them. We’re always fighting for them. We have thousands of troops all over Europe. In Germany, we have 50,000 troops and then you want a little give us a little nudge, give us a little kiss. We don’t want much.

First of all, Mark Rutte’s enthusiastic agreement throughout this exchange was more than a little uncomfortable to watch.

Second, Donald fundamentally misunderstands NATO.

The United States remains the only country ever to invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Our allies answered that call. They fought alongside us in Afghanistan. Many lost soldiers fighting in support of the United States. That is what alliances look like.

Donald talks constantly about loyalty, but what he actually wants is obedience.

He says he does not care about money, yet nearly every conversation he has about NATO eventually turns into complaints that our allies are not paying enough. He also ignores the fact that American troops stationed throughout Europe serve American strategic interests just as much as they serve Europe’s. Forward deployment strengthens deterrence, improves readiness, and protects American security.

What Donald wants is a relationship in which every NATO country remains completely loyal to him while he owes absolutely nothing in return.

Those are not the words of somebody who understands diplomacy. They are the words of somebody who understands only transactional relationships built around power, personal loyalty, and grievance.

It is difficult to overstate how dangerous that mindset becomes when applied to international alliances painstakingly built over the course of nearly eighty years.

Donald understands nothing about the liberal democratic alliance established after World War II. Worse still, he appears determined to dismantle it because he neither understands nor values what it has accomplished.

That pattern repeated itself later in the day.

During a press conference on a bipartisan housing bill, Donald announced that he would refuse to sign legislation designed to help millions of Americans struggling with housing costs unless Congress first passed the SAVE Act, a voter suppression bill Republicans have thus far been unable to push through Congress.

Lawmakers in both parties were caught off guard, and the scheduled signing ceremony was abruptly canceled.

Donald was asked why he was holding the housing bill hostage.

I said I’m not signing the housing bill. I want to see what happens with SAVE. Look, the housing bill is... I made billions of dollars with housing. I know housing better than anybody, maybe anywhere. It’s all about the interest rate. Lower the interest rates. You can have all the housing you want. But you have to understand, I don’t want to hurt people that own houses too. These people, for the first time in their lives, they have valuable houses. They become rich. I don’t want to hurt them either. What you want to do is what’s good for everyone, get the interest rates down. We have this numbskull that was the head of the Fed before and he’s a stupid person... We need low interest rates. Low interest rates will solve everything.

We’re apparently doing so well on housing that Congress felt compelled to produce one of the rare bipartisan bills of this Congress specifically to address the housing crisis.

Once again, Donald demonstrates that he neither understands the issue nor the legislation before him.

Lower interest rates alone will not solve America’s housing crisis.

His attack on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell ignores the reality that Powell could not simply slash interest rates while Donald’s tariffs were driving inflationary pressure throughout the economy. Doing exactly what Donald demanded would likely have made inflation even worse.

Donald knows none of this.

He also continues to insist that he is some unparalleled genius of real estate.

He wasn’t.

My grandfather was.

Fred Trump built an enormously successful housing business over decades. Donald inherited that empire, benefited from it enormously, and then steadily sold off many of its assets because he proved far better at attaching his name to buildings than actually building or managing them.

The bipartisan housing bill Donald is threatening to derail would increase housing supply, reduce costs for working families, and limit the ability of massive investment firms to continue buying single family homes at the expense of ordinary Americans. It passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support precisely because lawmakers recognized that housing affordability has become one of the country’s most pressing economic problems.

Ironically, that broad bipartisan agreement may be exactly why Donald refuses to sign it.

If everyone wins, Donald cannot claim exclusive credit.

There is another possibility as well.

Donald may be attempting to use the housing bill as leverage to force Republicans into passing the SAVE Act, legislation that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with housing. The only connection is political.

He understands what the polling increasingly suggests. Without making it harder for certain Americans to vote, Republicans face an increasingly difficult road in next year’s elections.

Fortunately, Donald appears not to understand how legislation actually works.

If he refuses to sign the housing bill without vetoing it, it automatically becomes law after ten days.

If he vetoes it, Congress appears to have more than enough bipartisan support to override that veto.

So perhaps Donald should spend a little less time threatening Congress and a little more time watching Schoolhouse Rock.

Donald has repeatedly claimed that one of his administration’s greatest accomplishments has been solving what he calls America’s affordability problem. Of course, this is the same Donald who has also insisted, more times than I can count, that the affordability crisis is a hoax that doesn’t actually exist.

This is what Donald said:

But what we’re really doing well is oil is plummeting and costs are coming down. Affordability. We’re doing great. The Democrats gave us a tremendous affordability problem and we’re reducing prices a lot.

That is difficult to reconcile with reality. Prices continue to rise, largely because of Donald’s tariffs and, more recently, because of his illegal, unconstitutional war of choice against Iran. Rising gasoline prices increase the cost of transporting virtually every consumer good. Fertilizer has become increasingly unaffordable for American farmers, driving up food prices, while inflation continues its upward march. Nevertheless, Donald insists everything is going wonderfully while simultaneously promising a new plan to lower prices. Apparently the economy has never been better, but it also desperately needs fixing.

His latest solution is particularly revealing. Donald now wants the Department of Justice to investigate America’s largest oil companies for alleged price gouging. It is an interesting choice considering that Big Oil has long been among his strongest political allies and one of the industries that has benefited most from his policies, whether through the dismantling of clean energy initiatives or opening protected lands to expanded drilling.

A reporter asked Donald to explain the investigation.

Donald: So it’s ExxonMobil, it’s Chevron. It’s Shell, it’s BP, it’s a lot of them. The gasoline or the oil prices have come down so much and we are not seeing anything at the pump by comparison to what it should be. We should be, in my opinion, at $2.25 right now at the pump and we’re higher than that and we are doing a big investigation on it.

Breaking news. Apparently oil executives are also responsible for the algae bloom in the Reflecting Pool.

The irony is almost impossible to ignore. Donald has spent years doing everything possible to benefit these companies, only to blame them the moment his own policies produce politically inconvenient consequences. If Donald believes gasoline should cost $2.25 a gallon, then in his mind it simply should. The possibility that his own decisions may have driven prices higher is never entertained because Donald is constitutionally incapable of admitting he was wrong.

Reality, however, is considerably more complicated than Donald imagines. Although the price of crude oil has fallen from its wartime peak of more than $115 per barrel, it remains significantly higher than it was before the conflict began. There is also little reason to believe prices will continue falling if the fragile peace agreement with Iran collapses. Even if oil prices continue declining, experts have warned from the beginning that it can take months, if not longer, for gasoline prices to return to prewar levels.

There are obvious reasons for that delay. Supply chains remain disrupted because infrastructure throughout the region has been damaged by the war. Shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz continue to face delays while mines are cleared. Insurance premiums for tankers have increased dramatically, shipping companies are paying additional transit fees, and transportation costs continue to ripple throughout the global economy. These are entirely predictable consequences of the conflict Donald chose to start. Economists understood them before the first bomb fell. Donald apparently did not.

This is simply the latest example of Donald searching for someone else to blame for problems entirely of his own making. Just as he continues blaming imaginary vandals for the Reflecting Pool disaster, he is now pointing fingers at oil executives for gasoline prices driven largely by his own reckless decisions.

Speaking of the Reflecting Pool, Donald was asked whether repairs would be completed before the Fourth of July.

Donald: The pool? It’s in great shape. Ready? Thugs. They just told me a little while ago, six have been arrested and like six or seven are under investigation. They have pictures and everything else. They went to the bottom and it’s not a paint job. It’s very expensive. It’s not rubber, but it’s like rubber. And they went down with probably a box cutter or a very sharp razor of some kind or a knife and they cut and then they started ripping it up. You know why? Because they’re sick people.

So the Reflecting Pool is supposedly in great shape, except for the gangs of imaginary box cutter wielding vandals Donald apparently believes are staging a coordinated assault on a national monument simply to embarrass him.

The remarkable thing about this entirely self-inflicted disaster is that it exposes exactly who Donald has always been: incompetent, corrupt, greedy, and utterly incapable of accepting responsibility for his own failures. The algae bloom was predictable. The decision to coat the bottom of a shallow reflecting pool with a dark sealant created ideal conditions for excessive heat absorption and algae growth. Once the algae spread, workers poured large quantities of hydrogen peroxide into the water in an effort to eliminate it. The chemicals reacted with the sealant, causing it to separate from the bottom of the pool. Every attempted solution has only compounded the original mistake.

The situation has continued to deteriorate. Wildlife has already been affected, with ducks reportedly dying because of the chemicals being introduced into the water. Innocent people have been arrested while Donald continues insisting, without presenting a shred of evidence, that criminal conspiracies are responsible for what everyone can plainly see resulted from catastrophic incompetence.

The Reflecting Pool has become more than a construction failure. It has become an almost perfect metaphor for the Trump regime itself. Every problem is somebody else’s fault. Every failed solution creates even greater damage. Every attempt to conceal reality requires another increasingly implausible lie.

Donald has instructed Americans not to believe their own eyes.

Donald: But the Reflecting Pool is great and it’s going to look beautiful. It’s so sad to see what they did. And then the fake news tries to say, “Oh, well, it didn’t work.” Of course it worked. Everything I do works. What I do best is build.

Everything he does works.

That may be the single most revealing statement he made all day.

Donald has never built anything in his life. He inherited an enormously successful business built by my grandfather and spent decades attaching his name to projects created by other people while repeatedly driving companies into bankruptcy. The evidence demonstrating that so much of what he touches ultimately fails is overwhelming.

Donald embodies one very simple truth. It is infinitely easier to destroy things than it is to create them.

Unfortunately for all of us, destruction has become the defining feature of his presidency.