Trump Wouldn't Give Welker the Soundbite. She Got a Walkout Instead.
Plus: Iran and Israel trade strikes while Trump bluffs toward a ceasefire, and Maine's "believe all women" party rediscovers redemption.
Hey friends!
Sorry, I went dark over the weekend, but I pressure-washed my entire pool deck and front driveway, which took an entire day and the morning of the next day. It’s the only “outside” job I do around here. I weirdly enjoy it, but I also can’t move today.
This morning I was staring at my driveway while I drank my coffee. I have become one of those people.
Let’s get into the news.
In Today’s Read
Trump wouldn’t rule out paying January 6 defendants from his slush fund. Welker badgered for a clean yes, didn’t get one, and he ripped off the mic and left. The walkout was the clip. The answer was the story.
Iran and Israel traded strikes overnight while Trump pushed a ceasefire. It’s a bluff, and the loudest “disaster” takes are coming from people rooting for one.
Maine’s about to nominate Graham Platner anyway, and the “believe all women” party just discovered redemption.
The Quick Rundown: the Pope rebukes the Iran war, California’s count keeps erasing the GOP leads, 12 shot in Toledo, an ISIS drone plot, and Trump wants his face on the money.
He Walked Out
The Story.
Trump sat with NBC’s Kristen Welker in a barn in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, on Friday, for an interview that aired Sunday on Meet the Press. Welker asked whether his $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund would pay anyone who assaulted police on January 6. Trump: “I wouldn’t be inclined to say so, but I have to see it.” Welker pushed back that 172 people pleaded guilty to assaulting officers; Trump said they pleaded because they were “frightened,” staring down fifteen years. She circled back to it, he circled back to “dirty cops” and a “rigged” California count, and about fifty minutes in he called NBC “a one-sided crooked network,” told her “thank you, darling, have a good time,” pulled off his mic, and left. The fund is the same one acting AG Todd Blanche told Congress on June 2 was “not moving forward with, period,” and that a judge froze on May 29.
The Left’s read. The Daily Beast led with his age (“Donald Trump, 79, Storms Off”). The Wrap and Variety made the walkout itself the story, a president who can’t take a fact-check. MS NOW went into the substance, arguing the real news was the non-denial on paying cop-assaulters, not the exit.
The Right’s read. Fox ran “rips Welker, ABC, CBS, CNN as crooked.” Townhall, PJ Media, and RedState framed it as a man refusing to sit for a hit, and predicted, correctly, how the rest of the press would spin it.
What both sides are skipping. The left loops the walkout because “elderly president melts down” writes itself. The right won’t touch the J6 payout because “would you cut a check to people who beat cops” splits the coalition. So the one exchange that actually moves money, a president declining to rule out paying people convicted of assaulting officers, got buried under a fight about a microphone.
Let’s be fair to Welker first. She’s a reporter, and pushing a politician who dodges is the job. I don’t want a press corps that hears “I’d have to see it” and nods along. Still not a fan but I get it.
But this stopped being an interview and turned into a hunt. Trump gave her an answer. “I wouldn’t be inclined to say so, but I have to see it.” It’s the one he gives constantly, because he hates being pinned to a yes or no he can’t walk back. Welker wanted the clean “yes,” the kind you cut into a fifteen-second clip captioned “Trump backs payouts for cop-beaters.” He wouldn’t hand it over, so she asked again, and again. That’s when he walked. These outlets fly to a barn in Wisconsin hunting one bad line, and when it doesn’t come, the digging becomes the story.
Now the stat she kept swinging. 172 people pleaded guilty to assaulting police. True, and stripped of the only context. No surprise there.
A guilty plea isn’t always a confession. It’s frequently a calculation. When the DOJ overcharges you, freezes your money, and offers a choice between a plea and a decade in a cell, plenty of people with no lawyer on retainer and limited funds take the deal, whether they did the worst version of it or not. That’s what makes a weaponized DOJ so sinister: it manufactures the plea, then the press recites “they pleaded guilty” like that closes the case. Which is exactly why “I’d have to see it” is the right answer and not the dodge they are selling.
And here’s the part nobody on the right actually wanted aired, which is its own tell. Republicans don’t want this fund within a mile of a midterm, because it hands Democrats a layup: Trump’s cutting checks to the January 6 mob. The press will run that line the way it runs everything about that day, flattening “January 6” into nothing but beaten cops and a trashed Capitol. That violence was real and ugly, and I’m not waving it off. But of the 172 who pleaded guilty to “assaulting” officers, how many actually injured someone, versus how many shoved a barricade or pushed through a line and watched it get charged as assault, then took the plea because, see above, fifteen years? Nobody puts that on a chyron. The blur does the work. And hold it next to the summer everyone’s supposed to have forgotten, when blocks of American cities burned in 2020, and a pile of those arrests got quietly dropped or never charged at all. One riot the press christened “mostly peaceful.” The other one still can’t stop calling it an insurrection. It was horrible and ended in 6 hours. The other terrorized cities and the country for an entire summer.
So yes, if the government abused its power, compensating the people it actually railroaded isn’t crazy. That’s the ordinary remedy when the state wrongs you. The hard question should not be whether. It’s how. Who sits on the panel? Who sorts the man who swung a flagpole from the retiree who walked through an open door and took a selfie? Those are questions worth asking, tough on the government and the fund at once. We got a shouting match about a mic instead.
My guess is the fund is dead, at least for now. It’s not politically viable in the lead-up to the midterms. Many Americans are not interested in relitigating the past, and this will become the headline if it happens. That is unfortunate for some who were prosecuted, but it’s the truth. Does that mean the President will let it go? Maybe for now. Watch the outlets drum it up again as we approach the midterms. Watch it become a talking point on the campaign trail. And watch how many “172 pleaded guilty” headlines ever mention what those pleas cost the people who took them.
Trump Said Stand Down. Everybody's Bluffing.
The Story.
It flared back up overnight. After Iran fired roughly 30 ballistic missiles at northern Israel on Sunday, June 7 (the Houthis added two), the first barrage since the April ceasefire, Israel struck back early Monday, hitting military targets in western and central Iran, a petrochemical plant in the southwest, and what the IDF called "an extensive strike against strategic defence systems," with blasts in Tehran and Tabriz (Iranian officials reported no casualties so far).
A senior U.S. official said Trump had called Netanyahu and urged him not to retaliate; Israel went ahead. Netanyahu is also heading into a fall election that's become a referendum on his handling of the war. Trump's line afterward, to the Financial Times: "I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn't call the shots."
On Truth Social he posted the two sides "are looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE!" and that "Final negotiations on 'Peace' are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way," with the U.S. blockade staying until a deal. Iran's IRGC says any ceasefire is "conditional on a cease-fire on all fronts," meaning Lebanon and the blockade; Iran says its attacks on Israel are now "over." Brent crude jumped nearly 5% to about $97, and the war is past day 100
The left's read. CNBC, NPR, and Al Jazeera lead with the ceasefire "faltering" and the slide back toward full-scale war, Trump's restraint plea ignored, the talks imperiled. The throughline is quagmire.
The right's read. Split. Hawks want Israel's overnight strike to be the start of finishing the job, and read Iran's 30 missiles as proof Tehran bargains in bad faith. The camp closer to Trump reads the exchange as managed pressure, a couple of permitted blows to keep both sides at the table, and points at the White House's own "Peace Through Strength" framing. Neither camp says much about the part where even friendly assessments admit Operation Epic Fury did real damage but never reached the deepest sites.
What both sides are skipping. The "illegal war" cry, and the amnesia underneath it. The 100-days math assumes one continuous war. The administration says Epic Fury ended at the April ceasefire and that this is a new operation, Project Freedom, which on the executive branch's long-running "intermittent hostilities" theory restarts the 60-day War Powers clock. Hate the argument if you like. Obama ran a version of it in Libya, Clinton blew past the clock in Kosovo, and a line of presidents have called the War Powers Resolution unconstitutional and worked around it while Congress watched on purpose, because Congress would rather complain than own a national-security call that might go wrong. The only new variable is the name on the desk. So when an outlet brands this "unauthorized" with no mention that every modern president did the same, that's not law. It's the narrative in a law-school blazer.
My friend Amanda Peterson has a great geopolitics newsletter, if you are looking for a source to trust.
Let me start with a confession, because nobody else will. I don’t know what’s happening here, and neither do you, and you should be suspicious of anyone who says they do, the president included. This is a negotiation, and most of what you’re watching is theater staged for the table.
Read it like a poker game. Iran fires thirty missiles it knows Israel will mostly knock down, because after getting its military taken apart it needs to look like it can still throw a punch. Israel hits back hard, partly because it can and partly because Netanyahu is running into a fall election that’s become a referendum on whether he looks strong, and an Israeli electorate that won’t swallow incoming missiles quietly. Trump lets both of them throw a couple of swings to save face, then gets on the phone and says do not escalate, because the one thing he cannot afford is this spiraling into a real war that craters the stock market and sends oil past $100. Everybody got to look tough. Nobody actually wants the table flipped. The “I call all the shots” line and the all-caps “immediate CEASEFIRE” are both lines in the same script.
Why is it taking forever? Two reasons that don’t make the coverage. Either the Iranians are slow-rolling, or they’re fighting among themselves over who’s even allowed to sign, and probably both. And every offer has to crawl up a chain of people who trust no one and crawl back, which takes weeks. That’s not proof the deal is dead. It’s what a deal between enemies looks like from the outside.
Now the part the cross-check is built for. A lot of these outlets, and most of the Democrats, are not anxiously hoping this works. They want it to fail. A Trump foreign-policy win heading into the midterms is the last thing they’re rooting for, and “quagmire” sells better than “uneasy truce holds.” Watch a ceasefire that holds get filed as a stumble, and a single missile get filed as a catastrophe. The framing tells you what the framer wants.
So no, I’m not handing you “Trump’s a genius” or “Trump’s a disaster” this morning, because I don’t know yet, and neither does anyone with a chyron and a deadline. What I’ll say is this: it’s a negotiation, the strikes are mostly noise meant to save face, and the people surest it’s a fiasco are the people who would most enjoy one.
Watch whether the ceasefire Trump posted holds past 48 hours. Watch oil and the S&P, because that’s the scoreboard he’s actually playing to. And watch whether one outlet covers the war-powers clock honestly instead of pretending this is the first president who ever ran one out.
Nobody at that table is telling you the truth. They’re not supposed to. I suppose it’s the art of the deal.
ICYMI
The New York Times Found Graham Platner’s Worst Allegations. Then It Buried Them.
Special Edition. Breaking down the full NYTimes catch and release article.
“Believe All Women” Has a Party Registration
Disclosure: as I noted Thursday, I know Lyndsey Fifield a little, the online way. Mutual friends, some back-and-forth on social, never met. You should know that going in.
The Story.
One day out from Maine’s June 9 Democratic primary, Graham Platner is still favored to win it. No real alternative got in (Janet Mills suspended her campaign April 30), and the markets haven’t moved off him despite last week’s New York Times report from three ex-girlfriends, one of whom, Lyndsey Fifield, says he grabbed her hard enough to leave marks and held her in a room. Since Friday, Platner drew warm, donating crowds at a Bar Harbor rally (“you have my back”) and told Maine Public the accounts are “false and, I believe, politically motivated.” Bernie Sanders called it a distraction from “the issues facing working families a little bit more than Graham Platner’s marriage.” Elizabeth Warren refused to engage with the conduct and pivoted to Susan Collins. Ro Khanna flew in to headline the rally, called the relationships “toxic and volatile,” said no one should attack the women, agreed Platner should apologize, then landed on “I believe in redemption.” Meanwhile, Fifield, a conservative, went public, accusing the Times of softening her account into “a gift to the Platner campaign.”
The Left’s read. Three deflections, none about the conduct: it’s “his marriage” (Sanders), look at Collins (Warren), believe-the-women-but-redemption (Khanna). ABC found Maine Democrats holding their nose (“What else are we going to do?”).
The Right’s read. Aim at the Times, with the accuser as lead witness. Fifield says the paper buried her, cut her corroborating witnesses and screenshots, and dropped other accusers it had lined up. The Daily Caller called it feeding victims “to the wolves.” One Nation put $3 million behind Collins.
What both sides are skipping. The right swings Kavanaugh as a dunk, not a standard: gotcha, hypocrites, never here's how we weigh evidence. The left answers every question about Platner with "what about Trump," which isn't an answer; it's a change of subject. And Fifield's résumé hands both sides an exit, since she co-founded "Ladies for Kavanaugh" in 2018: the left files her as a "Republican operative," the right calls her vindicated, and the actual side-by-side, Ford with no corroboration treated as gospel against Fifield with screenshots and named confidants treated as a smear, never gets the feature it deserves. And if anyone ever runs it straight, it comes from the right or the right-leaning press, and the legacy outlets pretend it doesn't exist. Their contribution so far is CNN asking whether scandals even matter anymore, the horse-race shrug that buries the standard instead of testing it.
I spent Friday on how the Times buried this, and I won’t redo it here. I want to talk about the Democratic response, which is a case study in walking a line.
There are two ways to handle a candidate like Platner if you’re a Democrat. You can pretend it isn’t happening, the Sanders route (”his marriage,” go look at gas prices) and the Warren route (change the subject to Collins). Or you can do the Ro Khanna thing, which is slicker and worse.
Khanna has spent years branding himself a fierce protector of women and victims. In February, he stood on the House floor and read six names into the record as men tied to the Epstein files. The DOJ later said several of them had no connection to Epstein at all. Didn’t matter. The point wasn’t accuracy, it was the posture: name the powerful men and believe the victims. Verification of the facts, inconvenient. Maximal and public, with zero benefit of the doubt for the accused.
Now put Platner in front of him. A named woman, on the record, with screenshots and people she told at the time, more documentation than Khanna ever needed to torch six near-strangers from the House floor. And suddenly the great believer finds his caveats. He flies to Bar Harbor, grants the behavior was “wrong” and “misogynistic,” assures the crowd Platner “took accountability” and “worked to be a better man,” then pivots to “redemption” and “his issues, stopping the war, taking on the billionaire class.” He believes the women, sort of, and he’s voting for the man anyway. That’s the straddle, and he’s betting his own party and the press won’t look too close.
Here’s the tell. If Khanna actually wanted the truth, he had an easy move. Fifield says the Times omitted screenshots, witnesses, and evidence she provided. The man who reads unverified names onto the House floor in the name of believing victims could have called on the Times to release every bit of it. He didn’t. He went quiet the second the receipts might sink his guy. Redemption, apparently, comes with the right to evidence out of publication.
And spare me the redemption sermon from this party of all parties. This is the operation that made cancellation a political weapon and torched careers over a decade-old tweet or an anonymous tip, all of it filed under accountability. It never once spared a Republican who asked for grace. Now “people grow” is the closing argument in a Senate race, because this time the sinner has a D next to his name.
Look, I’m for redemption too, and I mean it. A society that can’t forgive eats itself, and nobody is the worst version of themselves forever. But redemption and a Senate seat are not the same thing. The question was never whether Graham Platner can become a better man. It’s whether a man whose redemption is still in progress belongs in the United States Senate while it finishes. You don’t hand someone the keys to the institution mid-rehab and call the doubts a smear.
Watch whether Khanna, the great believer of women, ever asks the Times to unseal what Fifield gave them. Watch whether one Democrat who demanded a Republican quit over less holds Platner to the same standard. And watch how fast “believe the women” comes roaring back the day the accused wears the other jersey.
Redemption is a process. The Senate is a reward. Don’t confuse the two.
🗳️California's mail-in count keeps chipping away at the Republicans who led on election night. As the "blue shift" rolls in (mail ballots get counted later and lean Democratic), the GOP's Tuesday-night standings are sliding. In the governor's race, Steve Hilton (R) has slipped behind Democrat Xavier Becerra, who's already locked a November spot, and Hilton's grip on the second runoff slot is now threatened by Tom Steyer. In the LA mayor's race, Spencer Pratt (R) fell from second to third as progressive Councilmember Nithya Raman overtook him for the runoff against Karen Bass, by roughly 3,000 votes with counting ongoing. It's the same blue shift Trump spent the weekend calling "rigged"; about 3.5 million ballots remain uncounted, final results due July 3. ABC7
Trump called California’s count “rigged” as Republican leads faded. With ballots still being tallied from the June 2 primary, Trump accused Democrats of “cheating” to “steal” the governor and Los Angeles mayor races from Republicans. AG Rob Bonta said there’s “no specific allegation of any individualized act of voter fraud,” and Trump’s own DOJ debunked a viral claim that GOP candidate Spencer Pratt got “zero new votes.” The shrinking leads are the “blue shift,” mail ballots counted later and leaning Democratic. Time
Pope Leo says the Iran war fails the “just war” test. Aboard his plane to Spain on June 6, the first American pope said “there is no just war there” and called just-war theory “outdated,” a direct rebuke of the 100-day U.S.-Israel war on Iran. It escalates an April clash in which VP JD Vance told the Vatican to “stick to matters of morality” and let the president “stick to dictating American public policy,” a line the U.S. bishops’ doctrine committee corrected twice. NPR
The FBI charged three men in an ISIS plot to kill U.S. troops. Bisaam Ghafoor, 21, of Leawood, Kansas, and Californians Elias Shamsaldeen, 21, and Bereen Dzayee, 25, were arrested June 5 for conspiring to support ISIS, funneling over $2,000 to someone they believed was a member and financing drones meant to attack American servicemembers overseas. Per the complaint, Ghafoor said it would be “sick” to have his name on the drone. DOJ
Twelve people were shot near a Toledo street festival. Gunfire erupted around 5:30 p.m. Saturday near the Old West End Festival in Toledo, Ohio, wounding 12 from at least two shooters police say were “probably shooting at each other.” The youngest victim is 14, the oldest 61, two critical. No suspects were in custody as of Sunday. NPR
That’s The Read.
See you Wednesday. Stay nosy.
If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.