On Our "Virtual Route 99" With #RandomThoughts On the Political Scene with @realDonaldTrump

 We present a recent "snapshot" of engagements by President Trump recently courtesy the team at Politico:

President Donald Trump listens during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday. | AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

President Donald Trump has made his priorities clear. “I don’t care about the midterms,” Trump said today during his 12th Cabinet meeting. The comment came as the president spoke about why he hasn’t moved faster to end the war with Iran. But the remark also comes two weeks after the president told reporters “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” when approaching those negotiations. Even in the context of the war, the striking admissions point to Trump’s unexpected focus during his second term, in which he has become embroiled in a series of conflicts abroad — going to war with Iran, capturing Venezuela’s leader, escalating tensions with Cuba and threatening to annex Greenland, to name the major ones — amid plummeting approval and skyrocketing prices, all as his party faces hurricane-force headwinds with the midterms rapidly approaching. But for all the president’s alacrity to reshape the global order, he’s becoming decreasingly eager to talk about it. Instead, Trump during the Cabinet meeting returned again and again to his beautification projects in D.C., particularly his repainting of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. “I love construction, it’s very exciting,” Trump said, musing about his lifelong love of building swimming pools. He called the Reflecting Pool renovation “a really important thing” and suggested he’s considering a renovation for the World War II Memorial fountain. The president opened the meeting reading out from a binder a list of the successes the administration hopes to highlight ahead of the midterms. “Things are doing very well,” he began, launching into a 10-minute “weave” about strong jobs numbers, border security, a decreasing crime rate, tax cuts from his One Big Beautiful Bill, stock market records, low-cost generic drugs and retirement plans at an “all time high.” Trump did touch on the war several times, emphasizing that his ultimate goal is to ensure Iran never builds a nuclear weapon. As for the ongoing negotiations to end the war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “we’ll see over the next few hours and days whether progress can be made” — but reminded Trump that he had “other options … if that doesn’t work.” Iranian state TV today said it had obtained a draft memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran that would see Tehran restore commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz to ⁠pre-war levels within a month, while the U.S. would pull out its military and lift the naval blockade, per Reuters. But the Cabinet members gathered primarily sought to highlight the administration’s economic wins — and sweep away the less-flattering figures. “You’re leading us to the greatest economy that the world has ever known,” SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler said. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent returned to his repeated promise that gas prices would soon fall. VP JD Vance spoke at length about how his anti-fraud task force is saving taxpayers billions of dollars. Still, the war was never far from the conversation. “The continued resilience of the economy speaks for itself, even during the Iran — the, uh, conflict,” Bessent said, reading from a piece of paper. Neither was the Reflecting Pool.  “When you authorized ‘Operation Epic Fury’ — just like you talked about with the Reflecting Pool — we didn’t do the same old thing the way we’ve done it in the past,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said.