by Jen Psaki | Jul 24, 2026 | Donald Trump, The Briefing with Jen Psaki, White House, World
This is an adapted excerpt from the July 22 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Have you ever been in one of those situations where a friend starts to embarrass themselves — maybe they had a little too much to drink, maybe they said something they shouldn’t have, or maybe they just seem to be having a hard time keeping it together — and you have to gently cajole them into taking a break?
We’ve all been there at some point. And right now, that is exactly what it must feel like for MAGA Republicans trying to deal with President Donald Trump and the war with Iran he started.
A new Politico poll out Wednesday found that the number of self-identified MAGA supporters who think the president’s war is worth the economic costs has dropped 13% in just the last two months.
Just consider the advice longtime Trump supporter and MAGA darling Bill O’Reilly shared on his podcast this week. O’Reilly told the president to “take the next month off.”
“Get into an environment where you, like, golf and relax a little bit,” he said. “You got to deal with Iran — I understand that, everybody understands it — but you can do that on the phone, and you can do that with your people coming. But you need a breather.”
Now, was O’Reilly making that suggestion because he is genuinely concerned that Trump is not OK? Maybe. Or was he making it because he thinks this disastrous war will be easier to bring to an end if Trump isn’t sitting in the Oval Office every day? It’s possible. Or it could be a
by Jen Psaki | Jul 9, 2026 | Crime & Courts, Donald Trump, The Briefing with Jen Psaki, World
This is an adapted excerpt from the July 8 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
It’s already been a rough week for President Donald Trump, who has been facing humiliation after humiliation.
On Wednesday, a federal court officially ordered that $5 million of the president’s money be released to E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued him for defamation. In a blistering order, the judge wrote that Trump “has been stalling this case for years.”
It’s safe to say the president is not having a great week.
“A jury unanimously concluded that he sexually abused and defamed plaintiff and awarded her damages accordingly,” he continued. “It is time for him to ‘do equity’ and pay the judgment.”
Also on Wednesday, another federal judge rejected Trump’s efforts to put his name back on the Kennedy Center — a loss we know has humiliated Trump because his administration has left a tarp over the place where his name used to be, as if that tarp means his name is actually still there.
On top of all of that, Trump faced even more humiliation when his so-called peace negotiations with Iran fell completely apart. (Who could have seen that one coming?) The U.S. has already launched multiple new rounds of airstrikes against Iran, including one on Wednesday evening.
Trump has now declared his ceasefire over, claiming he doesn’t even want a deal anymore. Oil prices spiked and gas prices are expected to rise again soon.
So it’s safe to say the president is not having a great week. But perhaps the most humiliating thing that happened to the president in recent days — the thing you know gets under his skin
by Jen Psaki | May 7, 2026 | The Briefing with Jen Psaki
This is an adapted excerpt from the May 5 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
On Tuesday, Republicans in the Senate took the giant spending bill they are trying to rush through Congress and added a billion dollars to it — $1 billion of your hard-earned tax dollars earmarked specifically to build President Donald Trump’s lavish White House ballroom.
Now, that $1 billion price tag would be eye-popping even if it came out of thin air, but it didn’t. Since Trump announced his plan to destroy the East Wing and build a golden ballroom, the cost of the project has just kept growing, from $200 million to $300 million to $400 million.
First, Trump said he was going to pay for it. Then donors were going to pay for it. But now it’s you, the American taxpayer, who might foot the vast majority of the costs — because congressional Republicans want to add $1 billion in public funding for ballroom security features.
The Trump administration just so happened to give an inflated contract to the same construction company that is building the president’s ballroom.
And if the new taxpayer-funded addition to Trump’s ever-ballooning ballroom price tag wasn’t sketchy enough to begin with, that new increase comes just a week after The New York Times got this scoop: “Firm Building Trump’s Ballroom Got a Secret No-Bid Contract for a Nearby Job.”
Last summer, Trump chose a Maryland-based construction company to build his White House ballroom. Then in January, as the Times reported, government documents showed that the Trump administration “secretly gave the company a no-bid contract to do another job at a sharply inflated price.”
The National
by Jen Psaki | Apr 29, 2026 | The Briefing with Jen Psaki
This is an adapted excerpt from the April 28 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
You may remember when, in the run-up to the 2024 election, Donald Trump sued “60 Minutes” on the premise that the show had committed “partisan and unlawful acts of election interference” after it aired an edited interview with Kamala Harris.
The Trump team accused the network of interfering in the election simply because it didn’t air the conversation in its entirety. In the end, they sued CBS and ended up with a $16 million settlement payment.
This weekend, “60 Minutes” did exactly the same thing — except this time with an interview with Trump.
It was clearly an attempt to bully the network into covering him more positively and his perceived enemies more negatively.
Norah O’Donnell interviewed Trump for 40 minutes, then producers edited that interview down to just 13 minutes. Now if that doesn’t sound all that scandalous to you, it’s because it’s not. That is how lots and lots of TV interviews work, especially for long-form interview programs like “60 Minutes.”
The only scandal here is that Trump pretended Harris’ interview was a scandal, all to threaten “60 Minutes” and its parent company, CBS. At one point, he even called for the network to lose its broadcast license.
It was clearly an attempt to bully the network into covering him more positively and his perceived enemies more negatively. And now we are seeing that bullying dynamic in play once again.
Trump’s Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday ordered a review of all broadcast station licenses owned by ABC. While the agency says the review is about the network’s diversity and inclusion policies,
by Jen Psaki | Apr 16, 2026 | The Briefing with Jen Psaki
This is an adapted excerpt from the April 14 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
If you needed any more evidence that Donald Trump has become an absolute parody of himself, look no further than what took place at the White House on Monday.
You may have seen images of the moment when a delivery driver showed up at the door of the Oval Office with the president’s McDonald’s order and praised him for the no-tax-on-tips policy that passed as part of his budget bill last year.
President Trump just received a McDonald’s delivery order from a DoorDash driver outside the Oval Office!Thanks to President Trump signing No Tax on Tips into law, Sharron is using the $11,000 in tips that she made last year to support her family. pic.twitter.com/5JkpJo839k— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) April 13, 2026
The White House clearly wanted to portray the scene as a chance encounter, as if Trump was just a regular guy waiting for his french fries — never mind the armed Secret Service agents or guarded gates this delivery driver somehow skipped through.
But, as you probably suspected, the whole thing was an attempt at a PR stunt.
The woman who showed up at the door of the Oval Office was not your average DoorDash driver — she was actually flown in from Arkansas. And prior to making that 900-mile delivery order, she appeared as a witness at Republican field hearings touting the president’s big, ugly bill. She also appeared in promotional videos put out by congressional Republicans supporting that bill.
But even though this entire event was staged, Trump still somehow found a way to make it incredibly awkward.
After
by Jen Psaki | Apr 11, 2026 | The Briefing with Jen Psaki
This is an adapted excerpt from the April 9 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
“America First” has been the rallying cry behind Donald Trump’s entire appeal as a politician. It’s one of the main reasons he has stuck around as a fixture in this country’s political life for over a decade. And it’s an essential part of the fairy tale he tells over and over again that only he can make America great again, because he will always “put America first.”
It is supposedly the basis of his entire policy platform, including a main priority of his second term: implementing his sweeping and shambolic tariff plan.
Despite everything that America has been facing since the start of Trump 2.0, the ballroom is one of those topics that the president just cannot help but bring up at every possible opportunity.
According to Trump, his tariffs are supposed to protect and boost U.S. production. Especially for one American industry he has long claimed is near and dear to his heart: steel manufacturing.
The president’s promise to boost production of U.S. steel not only helped him get back in the White House, but after a year in power, it has helped him maintain the support of many of his fanatical supporters, even as he does one unprecedented, crazy thing after another — like, say, tearing down and destroying the entire historic East Wing of the White House just so he can try to build the giant, gilded, gaudy ballroom of his dreams.
Despite everything that America has faced since the start of Trump 2.0, the ballroom is one of the projects the president appears to be most focused on. He
