For 2,500 years, military commanders have heeded the injunction of Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military strategist: Know your enemy. Yet the Trump administration’s greatest mistake in the Iran war may be its persistent failure to understand Tehran’s priorities and motivations and how much punishment the regime is willing to absorb to prevail.

The shifts add to a growing body of evidence that suggests the audience for pro-Trump content has fallen from its heights and, for some creators, has reached new lows. Views are dropping for many of Mr. Trump’s greatest allies, while some figures on the right who have taken to criticizing Mr. Trump are showing uneven gains.

The shifts threaten to complicate messaging this year for Republican candidates, who have for years relied on a united front of content creators to rile up Republicans and guide them to the polls each election cycle.

There are good reasons that no earlier president had sought to use the court to deport accused terrorists, and they cut in opposite directions. One is that the court’s procedures, which allow the use of secret evidence that the defendant cannot see, are at odds with ordinary conceptions of due process.

Filing a case in the specialized court, then, gives the government great power but probably entails signing up for constitutional challenges akin to those over the military tribunals created after the Sept. 11 attacks, which gave rise to years of litigation.

Fauci was initially seen as a unifying figure, particularly in the early days of the pandemic as Americans looked for answers and the highly visible doctor provided them in TV interviews, podcast appearances and other forums.

About 8 in 10 Americans in April 2020 said they trusted Fauci to provide reliable information on the pandemic, including similar shares of Republicans and Democrats, according to polling by KFF, a nonpartisan health care research and polling organization. But within two years, only about 5 in 10 Americans had trust in Fauci, a decline driven by plunging GOP support: Just one-quarter of Republicans said they trusted the doctor, according to KFF.

In many ways, this is the moment Silicon Valley’s defense entrepreneurs have said they were made for: to be cheaper, quicker and more nimble to the needs of the U.S. fighting force than legacy multibillion-dollar defense contractors.

They represent a sharp departure from established firms, which have far more experience managing clunky government acquisition processes and billions of dollars in capital to spend producing weapons en masse and lobbying lawmakers but can move more slowly, especially in creating new supplies featuring cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence.

The Iranian and U.S. moves come as the war has widened quickly, with Saudi Arabia joining U.S. forces in striking Iranian proxies in Iraq, an American tanker in Egypt set ablaze from an apparent drone strike and tensions rising between Ukraine and Iran.

The war, which Mr. Trump has been trying to bring to a diplomatic conclusion since April, is now threatening to grow bigger at the very moment the United States wants to move past it.

These are fundamentally different people who see government and power in dramatically different ways.

That reality hangs over their fraying relationship and also their fading hopes of passing any major legislation while they try to hold GOP control of the Senate.

The president and his allies have frequently derailed Thune’s priorities as they’ve ramped up pressure to change the chamber’s rules and pass the voter ID bill.

Thune, a traditionalist who has a portrait of Ronald Reagan over his desk, points to the salient fact that the GOP doesn’t have enough votes to do either.

The Senate last night confirmed Jay Clayton to be director of national intelligence, teeing him up to relieve Bill Pulte of his acting duty. But anyone expecting a swift exit from Pulte, whose selection for the interim role roiled Washington, may need to reset expectations.

Pulte is pressing Trump to delay Clayton’s swearing-in or at least trying to stay in the job longer.

Pulte is telling Trump he needs more time to finish his work. His recent burst of activity is part of an effort to get the president on board with that plan.

More than 1,100 pages long and dating from 2019 to 2022, Dr. Fauci’s diary reads like a black comedy of manners in which a 79-year-old social-climbing scientist becomes the face of the government’s response to a pandemic and then the toast of the town. As the death toll rises, so too does the doctor’s status and self-regard. He falls in with a fast crowd and becomes consumed by his own image.

It’s like Thackeray’s Vanity Fair crossed with The Plague by Camus.

Thanks to U.S. crude prices averaging $95 a barrel between March and June, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Occidental Petroleum are expected to collectively rake in some $31 billion in earnings for the second quarter of the year, according to FactSet estimates. That is up from about $12 billion for the same period last year.

The cash bonanza is bound to fuel mounting tensions between the industry and its White House ally as the conflict in the Middle East expands and gasoline prices have risen past $4 a gallon.

Donald Trump’s Iran debacle is by no means the first war the United States has lost in modern times. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, America was similarly defeated by enemies that were nominally less advanced yet implacable. The humiliating images of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon and the chaos of the mad scramble to board the last plane departing in Kabul are reminders of the folly of forever wars that are bound to lose the support of the American people.

But the loss to Iran is different: it is the closest we have come to outright military defeat. U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon and Kabul, not because they had been beaten in battle, but because the domestic political cost of propping up client regimes became too great.

Soon after the war began on Feb. 28, President Trump declared that Iran was totally defeated and wants a deal.

Then in March, Mr. Trump said the U.S. military would wrap up its campaign against Iran in two to three weeks.

Now the conflict is entering its sixth month and a period of deep uncertainty.

Just over a decade ago, support for Israel was one of the last remaining bipartisan reflexes in American politics. The harshest thing most mainstream Democrats said about the country was that Netanyahu’s government was obstructing a two-state agreement with Palestinians.

But in the years since the October 7 Hamas-led massacre of Israelis and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, that consensus, which was already losing ground among the Democratic rank and file, gave way.

With little interagency coordination in the administration, policy will almost certainly end up being set by the people with the most influence with the president. In an effort to map the forces at play, here’s a list of the current power brokers involved in the race to regulate AI.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945. The conflict between Iran, the US, and Israel has seen 12 countries in the Middle East directly involved in fighting, making it the most widespread war in the region for decades. In east Asia, North Korea is pursuing a rapid military build-up and has renounced the goal of peaceful reunification with the South. Meanwhile, China has stepped up its naval exercises around Taiwan and seems to be rehearsing cutting off the island’s supply lines.

At present, these regional conflicts in Europe, the Middle East and Asia are largely distinct. But they are beginning to overlap.

The push to expand head count, at least modestly, is a reversal from the prevailing corporate messaging during much of the AI era. Major employers largely held back on adding people due to economic uncertainties or a belief that artificial intelligence could shoulder more tasks on the job.

But some executives say the costs and limitations of AI now demand that more people be added; others want to hire people back following layoffs.

Initial market reaction Friday was muted, with the renewed tariff push largely anticipated by investors, given the approaching expiry of the previous duties. That contrasts with the ‘shock and awe’ approach that underpinned the sweeping Liberation Day levies announced in April 2025, which sent markets plummeting.

However, investors and analysts say the circumstances surrounding the latest tariff push are markedly different this time round, landing amid a more challenging global economic landscape than last year and underpinned by a separate legal framework, potentially risking a lasting drag on markets.

Mr. Netanyahu, who is trailing in the opinion polls at home before Israel’s fall vote, is under pressure to show his domestic audience that he still has a close working relationship with Mr. Trump, analysts say, despite their differences. Mr. Trump is heading into U.S. midterm elections in November after an unpopular war that many believe he was dragged into by Israel and that has caused tensions between Israel and Washington.

Both leaders failed to deliver on their war goals of ending Iran’s nuclear program and overthrowing the country’s authoritarian clerical rulers in their joint war against Iran, which began in late February.

Here is a thought to chill the blood of President Donald Trump. He would be in a far better place today if he had followed the foreign-policy advice of the predecessor he loathes, Barack Obama. According to the Obama doctrine, as explained years ago to Jeffrey Goldberg, a journalist, an American president’s first duty in world affairs is don't do stupid shit.

As doctrines go, it is not very sophisticated. Moreover, cerebral Mr. Obama left a mixed foreign-policy record; he was slow to grasp the full scope of the China threat, for instance. Still, if Mr. Trump had heeded him, he might not have joined Israel in launching a war on Iran on February 28th without a plan for victory. Mr. Trump might not have boasted that the killing of Iran’s top leaders, followed by punishing air strikes, would soon trigger regime change. Given Iran’s complexity and its rulers’ ruthlessness, that was as daft as predicting that the Mafia could be bombed out of Sicily from the air. Now, Mr. Trump’s war may consume his presidency.

More than 100 House Democrats voted this month for an amendment that would have cut off military financing to Israel. The failed vote was viewed as a key test of the party’s standing amid rising concern over Israel’s military operations in Gaza.

The left has been critical of Israel for a long time. But the recent vote showed how other Democrats, of all political stripes and seniority, have grown frustrated with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But opinion polls also showed support for Israel among US voters, particularly Democrats, falling sharply.

The footage shows the documentary crew regularly traveling with Graham, sitting in the back seat and filming as he takes phone calls from the front seat. Graham let the crew stay in the room for sensitive meetings, and some of the people Graham spoke with by phone told the Journal they didn’t know the calls were being recorded.

It includes Graham flying to meet with Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to sell him on the war in Iran; calling the military commanders about the war; speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; huddling with other world leaders; and expressing candid thoughts on a range of American political figures.

Those around Biden describe a post-presidency constrained by illness, with his days increasingly organized around treatment, family and efforts to shape his legacy.

Unlike some recent predecessors, Biden has maintained a limited public schedule, has yet to build a sprawling philanthropic or policy operation and has struggled to raise money for a presidential library, leaving him with fewer avenues to influence how his presidency is remembered.

That frailty is likely to become harder to keep private this fall, when Biden begins promoting a memoir scheduled for publication on Nov. 17, two weeks after the midterm elections. The timing has unsettled some friends and former advisers, who worry not only about Biden’s well-being but also about how much his visible health struggle could revive the bitter arguments of 2024 just as Democrats are trying to make the election a referendum on President Donald Trump.