Late on Friday, former U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro – a former Fox News host and longtime Trump ally – chose to drop felony charges against a former Olympic athlete who was accused of damaging the Washington Monument’s Reflecting Pool. Trump swore that Pirro’s decision had been “folded like an umbrella,” flooding his Truth Social account with outrage and promising that the case would be revisited in the Oval Office the next day.
The pile‑up of disappointments was not limited to the waterfront. Todd Blanche, a lawyer who served as Trump’s criminal‑defence counsel, was fighting to become the permanent Attorney General. Two Republican senators—John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—joined Democrats to block Blanche, demanding he surrender a letter that formally repudiated a proposed $1.8 bn “anti‑weaponisation fund” meant to provide payments to people who claimed political prosecution. Blanche ultimately complied, releasing the letters and leading the senators to withdraw their opposition.
While the Reflecting‑Pool saga and the internal Justice Department dispute play out in Washington, another pressure point is growing. Trump has repeatedly accused Iran of double‑talk amid the on‑and‑off negotiations about a potential cease‑fire. After claiming Iran had stopped talks the day before, he condemned the nation in a truth‑social post as a “deceitful” aggressor and insisted he had no intention of launching a major attack since World War II.
Polls keep battering Trump’s approval reset; a recent Associated Press survey put him at 33 % while the same data from CNN, Quinnipiac and YouGov was even lower. Trump insists those figures are fake, but the mood is clear: his bench of loyalists is collapsing, the war with Iran is stalling, and mid‑term elections in three months could test his resilience as the second‑term president.
If the current trajectory holds, the snarling clashes between Trump and his trusted aides will only deepen as the political reality catches up to alternative narratives. The same setbacks that crack him could also galvanise his core supporters—yet the balance of Washington’s Capitol Hill will be the ultimate judge of his dominance, at least until the next battleground election.
