(The wifi in my building has slowed to a crawl so this APR is truly…abbreviated. -ck)

We begin today with David A. Graham of The Atlantic reminding us of what a incompetent dealmaker that Donald John Trump has always been.

“Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges. North Korea, Russia, Russia again, China, and China again have gotten the better of the United States. Trump has had to slink back to Washington without much to show except empty talk about friendship with whatever dictator has just run circles around him. He’s had some success in brokering agreements when acting as a third party (though not nearly as much as he pretends) but much less luck when his own government is a participant. The one glaring exception came when he was effectively negotiating with himself, getting his own administration to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political allies.

The newest example of Trump’s artlessness is Iran. Let’s review the past few days: Trump posted on Saturday that he was close to striking a deal with Tehran that would end the war he started earlier this year and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As the outlines of the agreement began to emerge, it looked both incomplete and bad: Trump had postponed discussing the hardest issues—matters, such as nuclear weapons, that led him to go to war—in exchange for opening the strait, which was open before Trump started the war. Hawkish Trump allies promptly criticized the deal, and despite histrionic pushbackfrom Trump aides, the president had begun backing off claims of an imminent agreement by Sunday. “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama,” he posted. “Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet.” Yesterday, in a sign that a deal might not be near at all, the U.S. military conducted what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iranian targets—directly contradicting the administration’s previous claims about having wiped out any threats to the United States in Iran. […]

Trump is desperate for a deal, and everyone knows it. His misjudgments have led him to corporate bankruptcies and cheap sales in business, and he’s in a similar situation now. Every conflict between an autocracy and a democracy (however fragile this one may be) is asymmetric: Trump has to be concerned about public opinion, whereas Iran’s leaders have shown not only that they are indifferent to the suffering of their people; they are willing to massacre them by the thousands. But as the war drags on with no positive resolution in sight, and the U.S. economy looks shakier, Trump has become visibly more frantic to reach a peace agreement. (The president also seemed eager to have something to show for his weekend, because he skipped his eldest son’s wedding, ostensibly to work.) Iran, sensing Trump’s need for a deal, has maintained a hard line.

Ellen Ioanes of The American Prospect says that adviser Stephen Miller may be as influential on foreign policy as he is on domestic policy.

“Miller’s interpretation of his current role as homeland security adviser is expansive; he doesn’t just work to thwart terror attacks or direct policy for the Department of Homeland Security. He also turns domestic security policy—like terrorizing noncitizens and industrial-scale deportations to places like El Salvador and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)—out onto the world.

“For Stephen Miller, foreign policy isn’t international policy, it’s policy for foreigners, whether they’re inside the United States or outside of the United States,” the former Foreign Service officer said in an interview.

The best way to understand that dynamic, the former Foreign Service officer said, is through U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean; specifically, the repeated airstrikes on small boats that the administration claims are tied to “narco-terrorist gangs.”

Miller reportedly floated the idea to attack boats of migrants headed to the U.S. back in 2018, according to a book by Miles Taylor, who was chief of staff at DHS during the first Trump administration. “Tell me why can’t we use a Predator drone to obliterate that boat?” Miller reportedly asked the then-commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, according to Taylor’s account. When told that such action would clearly be against international law, Miller reportedly told the commandant, “I don’t think you understand the limitations of international law.” Miller has denied Taylor’s account.”

The other way of seeing the Miller influence is that a nation’s foreign policy frequently is a mirror of its domestic policy.

Margaret Sullivan writes at her American Crisis Substack that perhaps, just perhaps, the mainstream meadia and the electorate has latched on to the Trump “slush fund” story.

“What has changed? It’s not just Trump’s doomed and misguided war with Iran, which is wildly unpopular, and has jacked up gas prices — perhaps the one thing that Americans can’t ignore. […]

It’s also his outrageous $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” which is increasingly being referred to — across the media landscape — as a slush fund for his political allies. It potentially will benefit even the criminals who attacked police officers on Jan. 6, 2021 at the Capitol. […]

Initial coverage of the slush fund last week seemed to be the usual thing — one-day coverage and moving on. (I wrote about that in the Guardian, criticizing the media for its short attention span and failure to communicate the big picture. )

But I’ve noticed something surprising as the days went on. There’s something about this fund that is sticking, something that’s not getting lost in the usual “flood the zone with shit,” in Steve Bannon’s immortal phrase.”

Yesterday, Greg posted a tweet of G. Elliott Morris linking to his Strength In Numbers Substack about varied views that the American electorate has about affordability issues. I have excerpted the “What voters actually want” section of that report.

“When we asked what outcomes would most help reduce people’s financial anxiety, the runaway winner was simple: lower grocery prices. 64% of Americans said cheaper groceries would help “a lot,” 20% said “some” — a combined 84%. The next-highest item was a raise or higher wages (47% “a lot”), followed by lower rent or housing costs (47%), lower health insurance premiums (44%), and a federal tax cut (42%).

When we asked about outcomes, voters mostly said they wanted relief on household bills. When we asked about policy, they gravitated toward redistribution and corporate accountability.

We asked respondents which two policies below would most reduce their financial anxiety. The top response was a tax cut for middle- and working-class households (35%). The second was raising taxes on high earners and corporations to fund more spending (29%). Stricter regulation of corporations and price-gouging (23%) came in third, ahead of reducing federal spending and the deficit (20%), a higher federal minimum wage (16%), and federal investment in affordable housing (14%).”