Over the past two weeks, President Trump and his administration have experienced an unprecedented, unbroken series of important military, foreign policy, and domestic successes, as well as a pair of landmark conservative Supreme Court decision victories. These are likely to be judged by history as among the most important accomplishments of his presidency.
The winning streak began with President Trump’s bold decision two weeks ago to launch the long-distance U.S. air strike that finished off the destruction of three key Iranian nuclear facilities, that Israel had begun attacking the week before. Israeli warplanes also cleared a path free of anti-aircraft installations for the seven American B-2 bombers, each carrying two 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs, which destroyed Iran’s uranium enrichment installations deep underground at Fordow and Natanz, while more than two dozen U.S. nuclear submarine-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles destroyed other essential Iranian nuclear facilities at Isfahan.
The precision of the American air strike was flawless, and the close coordination with the ongoing Israeli air strikes was extremely impressive. Nevertheless, CNN cynically attempted to challenge the success of the operation at delaying Iran’s ability to rebuild its nuclear weapons program. Both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies believe Iran had been on the threshold of a final breakthrough just before Israel launched its surprise attack on June 13.
To undermine the initial impression that the American air strike was a complete success, CNN published carefully selected details from a leaked preliminary Pentagon bomb damage assessment of the U.S. attack, which suggested that it was much less effective at destroying the Iranian nuclear program than President Trump had initially claimed. But what CNN failed to report, at least initially, was that there was “low confidence” by Pentagon officials in the accuracy of the assessment’s conclusions, and that a final assessment of the effectiveness of the air strike cannot be rendered before the acquisition of much more detailed information gathered from satellite pictures, other forms of electronic surveillance, and, if possible, direct, eye-witness observations at the three attack sites inside Iran.
Subsequent evidence suggested that the American attack was far more effective at disabling Iran’s nuclear program than the leaked preliminary assessment had indicated. But highly respected nuclear weapons experts such as David Albright and others noted that even if the attack was completely successful, it still would be possible for Iran to reconstruct key elements of its damaged nuclear program, especially if it succeeded in hiding at least some of its 900-pound stockpile of 60% enriched uranium at secret locations before the Israelis and Americans launched their attacks, and if Iran also had some undamaged enrichment centrifuges in reserve that it could get back into operation to finish the enrichment of the 60% uranium U-235 to 90% weapons-grade very quickly.
WILL THE AYATOLLAH DECIDE TO REBUILD IRAN’S NUCLEAR THREAT?
In the end, while the joint Israeli and American attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities were clearly a short-term success, their long-term effectiveness at eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat will mostly depend upon the decision of Iran’s isolated Islamic Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the continued willingness by Israel and Trump to renew their attacks should Iran try to restart the program and launch a crash effort to create a crude nuclear weapon as soon as possible.
But in the meantime, both Iran’s nuclear program and its ballistic missile arsenal no longer pose an immediate threat to Israel’s security, while Israel’s prestige and deterrence capabilities as the region’s predominant military power have recovered from the damage done to them by the IDF’s embarrassing failure to foresee or respond quickly and effectively to Hamas’ sneak attack on October 7, 2023.
President Trump’s reputation as a strong and resolute American leader, both at home and abroad, has also benefited in a similar way from his effective use of overwhelming American military force to achieve a limited and well-defined objective in attacking and apparently destroying Iran’s key nuclear facilities. No doubt his decision to engage Iran militarily was closely watched both in Moscow and Beijing, as they sought to evaluate just how much Trump 2.0 has learned about the use of his power since his first term as a rookie president, trying to learn while on the job.
While the Trump administration complained bitterly about the mainstream media’s efforts to minimize the success of the attack he had ordered on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and to repeat Democrat questioning of Trump’s constitutional authority and justification for ordering it, the administration wisely decided that the most effective way to fight back was by releasing the impressive details of the attack.
TRUMP RESPONDS TO MEDIA DISTORTIONS BY REVEALING THE FULL STORY
At a Pentagon press conference the next morning, the new Trump-appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, delivered an impressive after-action report to the American people, praising the men and women in uniform who piloted the 125 American planes involved in the attack for their professionalism, skill and dedication to duty.
Meanwhile, at the same news conference, Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, blasted the hypocrisy of Trump’s liberal enemies in the mainstream media for refusing to report the truth about the success of his decision to attack Iran to the American people, solely because that truth was likely to enhance his popularity.
Trump’s first major diplomatic initiative during this period, which began while the B-2 bombers and their crews were returning safely to their home at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, 37 hours after taking off on their mission, was his determination to force both Israel and Iran to agree to an immediate ceasefire. Both he and the Israelis realized that there was little more to gain from extending their 12-day long war which had drastically changed the military balance of power throughout the Middle East, and brought an abrupt end to the Iranian regime’s decades of efforts to dominate the region with the help of its terrorist proxy allies including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. It also seemed likely, pending the Pentagon’s final bomb damage assessment, to have put off, for at least a few years, the looming threat from Iran’s nuclear weapons program which had been on the threshold of completion before Israel launched its first wave of air strikes and covert ground operations by Mossad’s agents inside Iran on the night of June 12.
TRUMP COMPLETES THE RESCUE OF U.S. STEEL AND NEW TRADE DEALS
At the same time, Trump finalized negotiations on June 13 to revitalize America’s strategically vital domestic steel industry with the purchase of the struggling U.S. Steel company by Japan’s Nippon Steel corporation. Nippon Steel promised a multi-billion-dollar investment to modernize American steel factories, making them economically competitive once again in the global steel market, and creating thousands of high-paying manufacturing jobs for skilled American steel workers.
The economic rescue and expansion of U.S. Steel, as well as domestic American aluminum producers, was also greatly facilitated by Trump’s aggressive manipulation of his controversial tariff policies, which effectively forced America’s major international trading partners to increase their investments in the growth of the American economy. As a result, going forward, Trump is enabling American companies to compete fairly for customers in foreign markets on a much more level playing field. At the same time, Trump’s increased tariffs on the importation of vital strategic materials, such as steel and aluminum, have made America’s military establishment more self-sufficient. This is important as new threats have been emerging against key American allies in Europe and the Western Pacific from increasingly aggressive totalitarian countries such as Russia and communist China.
Last week also saw an announcement by the Trump administration, after several weeks of difficult trade negotiations, that China has finally agreed to lift its new restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals that are crucial to American industries for the production of powerful magnets. These magnets are essential to various electronic devices and many of the most advanced American weapons systems. The announcement was made last Thursday by Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, who said that China is “going to deliver rare earths to us” and once they do that, “we’ll take down our countermeasures,” referring to the export curbs that Trump imposed on China in May after Beijing failed to honor the deal it reached with the U.S. during talks in Geneva, to resume the delivery of rare earth exports to American companies.
Trump also scored another victory in his ongoing efforts to use tariffs to rectify unfair trading practices by countries such as Canada, which announced over the weekend that it would scrap its plan to impose a new digital services tax on leading U.S. technology companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon. This had prompted Trump last week to cancel the ongoing trade talks with Canada over the tariff that will be imposed on its exports to the American market.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, publicly expressed their confidence that several new tariff agreements with major trading partners will be announced before the July 9 expiration of the 60-day delay in the application of his new tariffs that Trump announced in reaction to the criticism that he received from American business.
Many business leaders and economists no longer appear concerned that Trump’s tariffs might tip the U.S. economy into a recession or upset international markets. Instead, the business and investment communities has been reacting with enthusiasm in anticipation of imminent congressional passage of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” whose tax cuts, combined with Trump’s -educing policies are expected to strongly stimulate the growth of the economy and attract further foreign investment to avoid Trump’s new tariffs.
TRUMP’S “ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL” ADVANCES TOWARDS FINAL PASSAGE
On Tuesday, Trump won another significant victory with the passage by Senate Republicans of their version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The 50-50 vote was ultimately decided by Vice President JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote at the end of a lengthy debating process, which was further extended by Democrat delaying tactics.
The bill then went back to the House of Representatives, where Republican Speaker Mike Johnson faced the challenge of convincing the most conservative members of his GOP caucus to accept the Senate version of the bill and send it to Trump’s desk for signature into law. This, despite the changes that had to be made by Senate Majority Leader John Thune to pass the Senate by the narrowest possible margin.
The major American stock markets have established new all-time highs in recent days, as Trump looks forward to a fresh surge in job growth, supported by lower energy prices, and continued low inflation rates, combined, hopefully, with long-delayed interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve.
TRUMP PERSUADES NATO ALLIES TO PAY FOR THE COST OF THEIR DEFENSE
In addition, as Trump was negotiating the final details of the ceasefire between Israel and Iran, he was flying aboard Air Force One to a historic NATO summit meeting in the Netherlands. In flight along the way, Trump received a congratulatory text message from NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte, praising the dramatic success of the American air strike on Iran.
While attending the NATO meeting, Trump was also gratified by the unanimous decision of the members of the alliance to agree to Trump’s longtime demand that they increase their financial commitment to paying the cost of Europe’s common defense to 5% of each member country’s national GDP. Once implemented, that decision will relieve the U.S. of the unfair financial burden that it has carried by supporting the alliance since its formation at the start of the Cold War more than 70 years ago, in response to a growing Soviet threat to the weakened democracies of Western Europe that were trying to recover from World War II.
That decision also significantly improved Trump’s public attitude towards America’s treaty commitments to NATO. Instead, Trump’s parting words last week to America’s European allies had an entirely different and more friendly tone. He said, “I left here saying those people really love their countries… And we’re here to help them protect their countries.”
The NATO countries were motivated to agree to more than doubling the spending target for their mutual defense from 2% to 5% at this meeting by the lessons they have learned from the bloody war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine. The three years of indiscriminate Russian missile and drone attacks has consumed huge quantities of weapons and ammunition and has been taking the lives of an estimated total of 5,000 soldiers per week from both sides, as well as a huge toll of Ukrainian civilian casualties and damage to that country’s infrastructure.
NATO members in Eastern Europe, including Poland and the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, have been willing to spend the most to build up their military defenses, out of a reasonable fear that they could suffer the same fate as Ukraine as Putin continues to pursue his stated goal of reconstructing Russia’s Soviet-era Iron Curtain Eastern European empire. Even NATO’s most prosperous Western European members, including Great Britain, France and Germany, and the alliance’s newest members, Sweden and Finland, have agreed to rebuild and modernize their long-neglected militaries, as well as their domestic defense industries, in order to continue the level of military support that Ukraine needs to continue its ongoing fight for survival against Russia to remain a free and independent state.
In addition, Trump was greeted at the NATO summit with greater respect from America’s allies after having demonstrated his resolve by ordering what now increasingly appear to have been highly effective bunker buster-bombing and cruise missile strikes that set back Iran’s nuclear weapons programs by years rather than just a few months.
TRUMP ENHANCES HIS DIPLOMATIC RECORD AS A PEACEMAKER
During his highly productive overnight visit to the NATO summit, Trump also announced another impressive foreign policy achievement, the successful brokering of a peace agreement ending the 30-year-long war between the central African countries of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“Today, the violence and destruction comes to an end, and the entire region begins a new chapter of hope and opportunity,” Trump said.
In addition to bringing an end to the bloodshed and helping to stabilize that section of Africa, the Trump-brokered deal will also give the United States much greater access to the rich mineral resources of Congo. They include several rare and strategically vital elements, including the world’s largest source of cobalt, which is a key catalyst for the refining of petroleum and several other industrial chemicals, an essential component of high-capacity batteries and military munitions, and crucial to the production of high temperature, corrosion and wear-resistant metal alloys, and hard diamond-cutting tools.
The conclusion of the peace agreement between Rwanda and Congo was only the latest demonstration of Trump’s mastery of the “art of the deal” which he honed during his decades as a successful real-estate developer before he entered politics, and which he has now, during his second term as president, been applying with great success to satisfy the needs of American diplomacy.
Several days after the peace agreement was announced, Trump hosted a ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House in which the foreign ministers of Rwanda and Congo flanked him while Trump declared proudly, “We just ended a war that was going on for 30 years with 6 million people dead. No other president could do it.”
Trump also gave much of the credit for negotiating the details of the Rwanda-Congo peace deal to his African envoy, Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-American businessman whose son is married to President Trump’s daughter Tiffany.
Another example of Trump’s rare skill in negotiating difficult diplomatic peace agreements between hostile nations was his success in brokering a ceasefire in May that brought an end to four days of dangerous, religion-based hostilities that broke out between two neighboring nuclear powers, India and Pakistan. Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan have gone to war with one another several times over the sovereignty of the disputed province of Kashmir since the two countries were created in 1947 by Great Britain’s withdrawal from its colonial empire, which had encompassed the entire Indian sub-continent.
Trump was also successful, during his first term as president, in negotiating other difficult peace deals, such as one that ended a war between the former Cold War-era Yugoslav provinces of Serbia and Kosovo. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were also able to develop during Trump’s first term an entirely new and successful region-wide approach to Middle East peacemaking, replacing the Oslo peace process. The Oslo approach had repeatedly failed to result in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and resulted in the Abraham Accords between Israel and four pro-Western Muslim states across the region and North Africa.
TRUMP DESERVES A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE BUT REALIZES HE WON’T GET ONE
Trump and his supporters have long argued that he has never gotten the international recognition that he has clearly earned, up to and including a Nobel Peace Prize, for each of these significant diplomatic achievements.
But even Trump’s critics, such as Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of the Eurasia Group, a widely-respected international geopolitical consulting organization serving multinational businesses and investors, conceded to the New York Times that, “Frankly this has probably been Trump’s best week in terms of foreign policy of his second term. . . [and] I think pretty much any objective observer would say that.”
Meanwhile, Trump is still working hard to negotiate an end to two ongoing wars between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as he had promised voters that he would do during last year’s presidential campaign.
While Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to negotiate in good faith has blocked an agreement on a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine that Trump has proposed, Trump’s talented chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, is now actively pressing both Israel and Hamas to agree to his latest ceasefire proposal calling for the release of 10 (roughly half) of the still-living hostages who were abducted by Hamas during its October 7 attack, as well as the bodies of 18 dead hostages, and the start of negotiations for a permanent agreement between Israel and Hamas finally ending the war in Gaza.
NETANYAHU TO VISIT THE WHITE HOUSE TO DISCUSS ENDING THE WAR IN GAZA
No doubt, Trump’s frustrated desire to bring the Gaza War to a successful conclusion was behind the White House announcement that Netanyahu was invited to visit the White House on July 7 for the third time since Trump was inaugurated in January. That invitation, as well as Trump’s public praise for Netanyahu as a successful Israeli war hero and Trump’s arguably diplomatically inappropriate call for the Israeli legal system to dismiss the ongoing criminal trials against Netanyahu, is a clear sign that Trump’s momentary burst of anger at the prime minister over the final Israeli air strikes on Iran before the ceasefire Trump negotiated took hold, has now passed. The two leaders are once more on the same page with regard to their diplomatic and military strategies for the entire region going forward, after the Gaza War has been successfully ended. There will be a concerted effort to expand the scope of the Abraham Accords, hopefully including the long-sought normalization of Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, last week, just a few days after Trump returned from the NATO summit, the bloc of six conservative Supreme Court justices, half of whom were appointed by Trump during his first term as president, handed him a long-expected legal victory by declaring unconstitutional the growing practice by dozens of liberal lower federal district court judges of issuing “universal injunctions” to block the implementation of Trump administration policies not only within their own jurisdictions, but nationwide.
The clear abuse by liberal judges of the power to issue temporary injunctions to block Trump’s policies has become a major problem for the Trump administration which has always argued that the judges were far exceeding the legal authority that was given to them by the Judiciary Act which was passed by Congress in 1789 to set up the original system of federal district courts.
SUPREME COURT FINALLY REIGNS IN POWER-CRAZED LIBERAL JUDGES
Passed by a 6-3 split vote in the Supreme Court, divided along ideological lines, the majority decision written by conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett found that there was no historical precedent or legal basis for giving unelected liberal district court judges the power to overrule the policies of a duly elected president based solely upon their personal political preferences. The decision has also paved the way for Trump to implement his policy decisions and executive orders that have been held up by 40 of these injunctions issued by district court judges, 35 of which were located in a handful of red states across the country.
The separate Supreme Court ruling, defining the limits of the authority of federal district court judges, arose as a side issue in a case called Trump v. CASA in which Democrat state attorney generals asked the court to overturn an executive order that Trump signed at the beginning of his presidency doing away with the long-established policy of granting automatic “birthright citizenship” to any baby born on American soil, regardless of whether their immigrant parents had entered this country legally or not.
The birthright citizenship concept was introduced by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was adopted shortly after the end of the Civil War. That section of the amendment was to make sure that the citizenship rights of any child born to former slaves would be guaranteed. But the language of that first section of the 14th Amendment includes an extra phrase, limiting its application to people who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, which President Trump and his administration claim was meant to exclude from automatic citizenship the children born to citizens of other countries who entered the United States illegally.
But the Supreme Court put off ruling on the birthright citizenship question itself until its next term, which starts by tradition on the first Monday of October. But the court did take the opportunity to resolve the separate legal dispute over whether any federal district court judge has nationwide jurisdiction, which has become a major impediment to the constitutional authority of the executive branch of the federal due to its abuse by the now widespread practice of “judge shopping” by liberal lawyers deliberately seeking to obstruct Trump’s presidential authority.
The basic argument against giving district judges the power to issue nationwide injunctions was expressed by conservative Justice Samuel Alito in his dissenting opinion in a case that came before the Supreme Court earlier this year over a nationwide injunction issued by a lower court judge requiring the Trump administration to disburse $2 billion in foreign-aid reimbursements.
In his dissent, Justice Alito asked, “Does a single district court judge, who likely lacks jurisdiction, have the unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars?”
“The answer to that question,” Alito continued, “should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a [5-4] majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”
In the majority decision which struck down the power of lower court judges to issue nationwide injunctions to hamstring President Trump’s executive authority, Justice Barrett writes, “Nothing like a universal injunction was available at the founding [of the district court system in 1789], or for that matter, for more than a century thereafter. Thus,” Barrett concludes, “under the Judiciary Act, federal courts lack authority to issue them.”
Instead, Justice Barrett concludes, the authority of lower federal judges is limited to the power to grant “complete relief” but only to the parties with legal standing in the case who are before them. The ruling also means, according to a Wall Street Journal editorial, “in cases of particular significance with broad national impact, [only] the Supreme Court can act and set a national uniform standard while the merits of the lawsuit are being heard by lower courts.”
THE SUPREME COURT’S LIBERAL JUSTICES CRY FOUL
Predictably, the three liberal justices on the Supreme Court strongly disagree with its decision limiting the authority of district court judges to interfere with the Trump administration’s ability to implement conservative policies. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes with alarm that “No [constitutional] right is safe in the new legal regime the [Court’s majority decision] creates.
Even more hysterically, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent calls Barrett’s decision “an existential threat to the rule of law,” to which Barrett responded sharply that Jackson’s argument hypocritically “decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
But thankfully, the definitive 6-3 vote by the Supreme Court has finally put the issue to rest, giving the Trump administration the power to implement its lawful policies without fear of obstruction by injunctions issued by power-crazed low-level federal judges seeking to impose their liberal beliefs upon the entire country.
Barrett’s decision confirming Trump’s presidential authority, as well as the advance of his “One Big Beautiful Bill” towards final passage by the House and Senate were seen as the most encouraging developments in Trump’s two-week-long winning streak clearing the way for continued success in the remaining three and a half years of Trump’s second term as president.
