WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump was in a great mood as he took the podium at a surprise White House press briefing on Friday.
His team called the briefing just after the Supreme Court upheld his executive order on birthright citizenship, ruling that lower courts do not have the authority to unilaterally block Trump’s agenda.
Not only that — the court also ruled Friday that schools violate religious liberty when they bar parents from opting their children out of classroom instruction involving LGBT-themed books, a major win for religious conservatives and for the Trump White House, which has championed parents and their right to decide what their children are taught.
Each ruling in and of itself would have been celebrated by the White House. But together, on the heels of Trump’s success negotiating a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, achieving a 5% defense pledge from NATO members, gas prices dropping to their lowest since 2021, and the stock market nearing record highs, the news made Friday “a really big day” for Trump.
“We’ve had a big week,” Trump told the clamoring reporters in the James Brady Briefing Room.”We’ve had a big week, we’ve had a lot of victories this week.”
The past week has indeed been full of wins for the president, both at home and abroad. After the United States bombed key Iranian nuclear sites with Tomahawk missiles and 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on Saturday, the president announced a ceasefire on Monday, strong-arming the two countries into a cessation of attacks on one another with a rare, emphatic f-bomb.
“They don’t know what the f**k they are doing,” an angry Trump told reporters shortly before getting on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Trump administration maintains that the Iranian nuclear sites were completely obliterated, and the White House has celebrated this as a massive win marred only by suggestions from legacy media outlets, led by CNN and the New York Times, that the United States failed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and only set it back by months.
These outlets cited an “inconclusive, low confidence intelligence assessment … leaked from deep state intel analysis to deep state news,” an administration official told The Daily Wire earlier this week.
Since then, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said that the agency has new intelligence indicating “several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed” by the recent American strikes; Director of National Intelligence’s Tulsi Gabbard cited “new intelligence” showing that “Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed”; and the president himself excoriated CNN’s reporter who broke the story, Natasha Betrand, pointing to her reporting denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop story — which was completely true — as “Russian disinformation.”
Trump then headed to the Netherlands for the NATO summit, where he convinced the leaders of member states to raise defense spending to 5% of their country’s gross domestic product by 2035. That’s a major victory for the White House and the president, who called it a “tremendous victory,” and who has long demanded that “freeloading” NATO allies pay their fair share for their own security.
“Winning is easy when the most consequential president in history is back at the helm,” White House Assistant Press Secretary Taylor Rogers told The Daily Wire. “President Trump has restored America’s dominance on the world stage and kept the promises he made to over 77 million Americans across the country. America is hot again, and we aren’t tired of winning yet!”
As he spoke to reporters on Friday, Trump pointed to the next big White House goal: getting the “Big, Beautiful Bill” signed.
Trump has called for lawmakers to get the bill on his desk by July 4. At an event for the bill at the White House on Thursday, flanked by the parents of children killed by illegal aliens, Border Czar Tom Homan argued that holding up the bill is putting American lives at risk.
“Every day we arrest a public safety threat, it makes this country much safer,” he said. “Who the hell would be against that? I get pissed off because I’m sick of meeting Angel Moms and Dads. You want to talk about family separation? They buried their children.”
Trump called on the Senate to get the job done as he headed to the NATO summit earlier this week, even suggesting they lock themselves in a room if they must as they work with the House of Representatives to reach a deal.
His direction was clear: “Don’t go home.”
“It will be a Historic Present for THE GREAT PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, as we begin the Celebration of our Country’s 250th Birthday,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post on Tuesday. “We are finally entering our Golden Age, which will bring unprecedented Safety, Security, and Prosperity for ALL of our Citizens.”
“NO ONE GOES ON VACATION UNTIL IT’S DONE,” the president warned. And during the briefing on Friday, he suggested that Democrats who vote against the bill are “voting in favor” of the largest tax hike in the “history of our country.”