U.S. President Donald Trump views North Portico renovations as he returns to the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 11, 2026. REUTERS/Aaron Schwartz
Hours before President Donald Trump was set to address the nation, New York Times columnists Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens used their weekly exchange to walk through what they cast as his foreign and domestic failures.
"Hi, Frank. We seem to be sliding back into war with Iran. Do you see any good outcome? Or, at least, a least-bad outcome?" Stephens began. Bruni answered "No," and said he has little faith Trump will achieve his stated aim of ensuring Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon.
Stephens argued the foreign-policy problem itself is workable, but the president is not.
"Dealing with Iran is a serious foreign-policy problem," he said. "Dealing with Trump's brain may be an insurmountable one."
Bruni said what scares him most between now and the November midterms is Trump's "effort to convince Americans that our elections are wholly corrupted — in favor of Democrats, of course — and that the results can't be trusted." He expects that to be the focus of Thursday's prime-time speech, pointing to Trump "firing or neutralizing officials who oversee elections, dispatching federal investigators to Georgia to rummage through documents from almost six years ago, issuing executive orders that demand state voter rolls and assert federal control over mail-in voting."
Stephens tied those concerns to the SAVE America Act. Both men also described what they see as Trump-era corruption, with Stephens citing a reported $2 million "development fee" from a South Korean company to a Trump holding company for an unannounced golf course.
Stephens raised the two recent ICE killings during vehicle stops, in Texas and in Maine. The man killed in Biddeford, Maine, was identified by neighbors and officials as Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian man in his mid-twenties who worked as a food delivery driver. Maine's attorney general's office said he tried to flee in his vehicle toward an officer and was fatally shot; advocates have disputed that account and called for an independent investigation.
Asked whether a midterm rebuke would free Republicans to break with Trump, Stephens said it might happen "in a generation or two. If we're lucky."