The war in Iran is going badly, and the PR war to sell it at home isn’t faring much better. RealClearPolitics’s polling average on the subject finds Trump an average of 9.9 points underwater when it comes to the war, with 41 percent approving and 51 percent disapproving. But maybe there’s a bright side for the president: At least that’s better than his generic approval rating, which is 15.4 points underwater in the RCP average. The mission is simple: First, they’ve just got to make the president as popular as his war is. Happy Friday.

The Only Play They Know How to Run

by Andrew Egger

The war in Iran is still at the top of everyone’s mind—and with good reason. But over the last twelve hours, the White House has suffered major defeats across a series of other important fronts.

The DHS shutdown is nearing an end, and it was the Republicans who blinked first. Overnight, Senate Republicans abruptly agreed to the offer Democrats have extended for weeks: full funding for everything in DHS except for ICE and parts of the Customs and Border Protection.

Republicans will try to pass ICE funding as part of a party-line budget reconciliation package later, and it remains unclear whether Democrats will be able to extract any of the ICE enforcement reforms they’ve been seeking. But the Republican capitulation is a significant win for the minority—particularly since President Donald Trump spent much of the last week haranguing his party to reject all deals and blow up the filibuster to pass DHS funding without Democratic support instead.

Just hours before, on America’s other coast, a federal judge delivered the White House another stinging blow, ruling that it appeared to have wildly overstepped its authorities when it attempted to label the AI company Anthropic a supply-chain risk.¹

In her ruling, Judge Rita Lin temporarily blocked the government from enforcing its designation as the case continues in court, offering a harsh assessment of the administration’s behavior as she did so: Anthropic, she wrote, appeared to have been “punished for criticizing the government’s contracting opinion in the press.” Even as the government reached for the most powerful tool it could find to punish Anthropic, it hadn’t even bothered to perform the basic compliance tasks required by the laws governing supply-chain risk designations.

“Nothing in the governing statute,” Lin wrote, “supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government.”

These two losses for the White House—on the DHS negotiations and on Anthropic—have a lot in common. In both cases, the administration held many if not most of the cards. But in both cases, it ended up falling on its face due to an unfortunate combination of sloppiness, hubris, and magical thinking.

As DHS negotiations played out in the Senate, the White House could have played a substantial role, trusting that senators would follow the president’s lead if he entered into the negotiating process. Instead, he remained on the sidelines, only popping out periodically to blow up tentative deals as they emerged: “I think any deal they make,” he said Tuesday, “I’m pretty much not happy with it.”

Meanwhile, Trump maintained a steady drumbeat of preposterous public “suggestions” for Republican negotiators: They were wasting their time dealing with Democrats at all, and should simply blow up the filibuster. Or, alternatively, they should keep squeezing the Democrats until they agreed not only to fully fund DHS, but to pass his top legislative priority, the SAVE A