Prominent conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson has a new label for President Donald Trump: “clown.”

On his Substack newsletter, Erickson slams the president over his approach to the Iran war, for which, he notes, Trump has at least 39 times in the last 65 days “declared the United States and Iran were close to a deal only to have the Iranians openly mock him and deny it.”

He notes too that Trump on Thursday morning told “Fox & Friends” that the bombing of Iran would resume. That changed quickly.

“By the afternoon, he declared bombings would cease because a deal was close,” Erickson writes. “He claimed buy-in from the Egyptians, the Emirates, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Israelis, the Iranians, and more.”

Both Egypt and Israel said they had no knowledge of a deal.

“The President, the other days, said Iran was playing us,” says Erickson. “The only one being played is President Trump. A state of war exists between Iran and its neighbors. The ceasefire is a farce. The President has turned into a clown.”

Erickson is no moderate — he was once the editor-in-chief of the right-wing website RedState and was a Fox News contributor. His bio on Spotify says his podcast “cuts through the chaos with bold clarity and biblical conviction.”

Erickson goes on to call it “Obamaesque” to think that any negotiation with a “terrorist regime that is premised on bringing about the apocalypse” is possible.

He says Trump chose to “engage” Iran and criticizes him for dealing “a serious blow” but not a “knockout” one. And he criticizes Trump for ordering Israel “to pull its punches.”

“We have now harmed our relationships with our Middle Eastern allies who depend on us for protection,” writes Erickson. “The situation is now more unstable than before the war began and it is all because of a single person who swears he’ll get a deal any day now.”

“The President should be embarrassed,” Erickson charges. “Instead, he’ll be mad at everyone except the man in his mirror.”

Image via Reuters 

Politicians, pundits, and pollsters are all trying to figure out what Democratic voters really want. With the extremely high stakes of the 2026 and 2028 elections before us — potentially including Supreme Court picks — divining the answer could set the course of the nation for the next decade, and longer.

But, as G. Elliott Morris writes at Strength in Numbers, the precise problem may just be that voters do not know what they want — or, to be more exact, what they say and what they mean can be very different. And that makes political strategy — and policy — nearly impossible to get correct.

Morris points to a recent New York Times poll that found a plurality of potential Democratic primary voters (47 percent) want the Democratic Party to move toward the center. But that very same poll of the same respondents also found that nearly half (49 percent) have a favorable opinion of socialism. And, to make matters even more difficult, a majority (55 percent) of those same voters say the party is neither too far to the left nor to the right.

“So what we’ve got here,” Morris writes, “is a Democratic electorate that is evidently pro-moderate, pro-socialist, and favors the party’s ideological status quo.”

Looking at a different poll, from May, Morris found that what all voters — not just Democrats — want are “middle-class tax cuts, higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and a crackdown on corporate price-gouging.”

“Either the electorate is hopelessly confused,” he continues, “or the ‘move left or center’ question isn’t measuring what pundits think it measures — or both.”

Morris digs deeper.

“Voters aren’t strategists, and asking them whether the party should move to the center doesn’t measure the electoral payoff of moving to the center — it measures whether they’ve absorbed, and agree with, the conventional wisdom that says moving to the center is how parties win,” he writes. “Those are different things.”

Morris goes one step further: “it’s not clear Americans have a good understanding of ideology anyway — or, at the very least, that that understanding translates in any way to policy and other outcomes.”

He notes that in the Times poll, nearly one-third of Democratic voters couldn’t explain what they thought about socialism —which means that this finding “indicates a low level of engagement with these subjects among the general public.”

Finally, Morris really gets to the heart of the matter.

He explains that he showed in April that only 8 percent of “self-described ‘moderates’ actually want moderation when you let them describe their politics in their own words.”

Image via Shutterstock

Emergency workers swarmed the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to investigate massive numbers etched into the grass that appeared to spell out an “86 47” message.

U.S. Park Police, the Washington, D.C. Fire Department, and the National Guard responded to the appearance of the numbers, which could only be read from a distant height, such as the top of the Washington Monument, according to The Washington Post. A large “8” can distinctly be seen from an Earth Cam atop the structure.

“The numerals 8, 6 and 7 were visible, but the 4 wasn’t clearly etched into the grass,” the Post reported. “It remains unclear how the markings were made. The term ’86’ is restaurant industry slang that generally refers to the unavailability of an item or a customer’s removal. Trump allies have argued it can also mean to kill someone.”

Trump is the 47th president.

In its indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, the Trump Justice Department suggested that the term “86 47” could be interpreted as intent to harm President Trump.

On the ground, the numbers only appeared as brownish patches in the grass.

“Multiple emergency vehicles could be seen encircling the grass around 1 p.m. A team of officers stood over brown patches in the grass, wearing gloves, and appeared to be testing the grass with materials from a yellow case,” the Post reported. “Pedestrians were not permitted to walk on the grass, and a Park Service helicopter circled overhead.”

A White House spokesperson in an email to the Post said, “Anyone who engages in or endorses political violence or assassination culture must be condemned in the harshest terms possible.”

They added: “They should also immediately seek psychiatric help to treat their severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has warped their brains and made them sick in the head.

CBS News reported that an Interior Department spokesperson called it “deranged vandalism” that “will not be tolerated.”

“Any threat against the President is taken very seriously by the Department, and our U.S. Park Police will investigate this incident and hold those responsible accountable,” they added.

Image via Reuters