June 29, 2025.

There are four political stories people should know about tonight.

First, President Donald Trump's tariff war and weaker consumer spending

translated to a contraction of 0.5% in the U.S. economy in the first quarter,

even more of a drop than the 0.2% economists expected. The economy Trump inherited from President

Joe Biden led the world in productivity. Second, John Hudson and Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post

reported today that intercepted communications showed that senior Iranian officials said the U.S.

attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities caused less damage than they had expected and that they

wondered why the strikes were so restrained.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points memo also called out that at a press conference in the Netherlands last Wednesday,

Trump said he had given Iran permission to bomb a U.S. airbase in Qatar in retaliation for the U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear weapons

program sites. They said, we're going to shoot them. Is one o'clock okay? I said it's fine,

Trump said, and everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn't get hurt, except for the gunners.

Marshall expressed astonishment that this admission has attracted very little attention.

He suggested that if it's true, it represents the most shocking dereliction of duty one could

imagine for the commander-in-chief, and he wondered how Republicans would have reacted if a Democratic

President had said he had let a foreign adversary fire on an American military installation.

Third, Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported today that the Republicans' budget

reconciliation bill makes the biggest cut ever to programs for low-income Americans.

Those cuts have made many Republicans skidish about supporting the measure.

After Trump attacked him yesterday for not supporting the budget reconciliation bill,

Senator Tom Tillis, a Republican of North Carolina,

...