The NPR Politics Podcast - Under Pressure? Trump Faces Key Deadlines on Hill, Tariffs and More

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

President Trump is nearing a critical juncture for several of his top priorities. He wants Congress to pass his sweeping legislative agenda by July 4th. His tariff pause expires on July 8th. And a leaked preliminary intelligence report has cast doubt on his claims that Iran's nuclear facilities were totally obliterated by last weekend's strikes.This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.This podcast was produced by Bria Suggs and edited by Lexie Schapitl. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Ira Glass with This American Life, each week on our show. We choose a theme, tell different stories on that theme. All right, I'm just going to stop right there. You're listening to an NPR podcast, chances are you know our show. So instead, I'm going to tell you, we've just been on a run of really good shows lately. Some big epic emotional stories, some weird funny stuff too. Then let us This American Life. Hi, this is Natasha in San Leandro, California, and I just sent 24 wildly exuberant kindergartners home for summer vacation. In the background, you can hear absolutely nothing. Blessed peace and quiet after a doozy of a year. This podcast was recorded at 1.09 PM on Wednesday, June 25th, 2025. Things may have changed by the time you listen to it, but I will still be reveling in my

nine weeks of not responding to the name teacher. Okay, here's the show. Her piece is our chaos. Doing the Lord's work. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you for teaching our kiddos. Yes. Teachers are the best. Hey there, it's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I also cover the White House. And I'm Mara Eliason, senior national political correspondent. Today on the show, President Trump is nearing a critical juncture for several of his top

priorities. He wants Congress to pass his sweeping legislative agenda by July 4th. His tariff pause expires on July 8th. And a leaked U.S. intelligence report is preliminary, but it has cast doubt on the president's claims that Iran's nuclear facilities were totally obliterated by last weekend's strikes. Let's start there. Mara, President Trump gave a press conference

at the NATO summit in the Netherlands this morning, and he again projected confidence about the strikes. So what do you make of his remarks? Well, I thought it was really interesting because earlier he said that he, by using the word obliteration, he got in trouble. He said, the original word that I used, I guess it got us in trouble because it's a strong word, it was obliteration. And he acknowledged that the defense community wasn't quite sure what had happened yet. It was very preliminary.

But in this press conference, he doubled down on obliteration and the message he sent was very clear. He said, Iran is not going to be doing nuclear. They've had it. It's over. We bombed it. To kingdom come. And it was almost as if he knows how unpopular the bombing of the Iran site is.

A recent Quinnipiac poll had 51 to 42 percent opposed to the U.S. getting involved in this. And he wanted to create this narrative that this is over. He solved the problem. Iran no longer has a nuclear program and will not reconstitute it. And that is not necessarily based on any reality. We simply don't know how many months or years the program has been set back. And we don't know whether Iran is going to give it up, as Trump says they are, or will they race for a bomb so they can be like North Korea? Nobody's bombing North Korea because they have many, many nuclear weapons. Yeah, that was the remarkable thing about that press conference is he was asked,

before this you were seeking a nuclear deal with Iran so that they would stop pursuing their nuclear ambitions. Do you want a nuclear deal with Iran now? Are you going to try to seek some sort of an agreement? And he said that US officials would be meeting with Iranian officials next week. We have no details beyond what he said. But then he said, what officials would be meeting with Iranian officials next week. We have no details beyond what he said. But then he said, what we would want would be for them to get rid of their nuclear program,

and we've obliterated it. On the domestic front, the Senate is supposed to take up President Trump's legislative agenda this week, the so-called one big, beautiful bill. And the president has set this July 4th deadline. He is imploring Congress to get this to his desk by July 4th. What's the urgency? Well July 4th is one of the big times when Congress members go home to their districts or their states. They walk in you know parades in this town or that town and they go back and see their constituents. And going home with a win,

a big win, yeah, I imagine that they would really like that. But one interesting thing about the one big beautiful bill here though is how popular are the provisions in this really? We've seen a distributional analysis from the Congressional Budget Office that showed that this bill would benefit richer people far more than it would benefit people on the lower end of the income spectrum. First of all, are voters getting that message? And second of all, do they believe it?

Beyond that, do they like the idea of Medicaid getting cut? I've seen polls that say no, they really wouldn't. So I'm very curious how that would go over. But at the very least, you can see how that would be a pressure point. Mara, what are the political risks for Trump and Republicans in Congress if they don't pass this soon? I think that they're going to pass this. It's almost unthinkable that they wouldn't pass Donald Trump's, not just his top priorities, all of his priorities are in this bill. And there's another reason they'd like to pass them before they go home to visit their constituents over the July

4th break because they might hear from a lot of angry voters because so far the tax cut bill is very unpopular, just like the first one was unpopular in President Trump's first term. People don't like the idea of giving big tax breaks to the rich and decreasing benefits for working class people. In particular, Medicaid, and what's happened over the years is more and more people

who are part of Trump's base get Medicaid. So I think, you know, Trump understands he wants to pass it fast so he can sell it. Let's take a quick break and we'll have more when we get back. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things and other currencies. With WISE, you can send, spend, or receive money across borders all at a fair exchange rate. No markups or hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. This message comes from NPR sponsor, Subaru.

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largest automotive donor. Learn more at Subaru.com slash care. Hey, everybody. It's Ian from How to Do Everything. On our show, we attempt to answer your how-to questions. We don Ian from How to Do Everything. On our show, we attempt to answer your how-to questions. We don't know how to do anything. So we call experts. Last season, both Tom Hanks and Martha Stewart stopped by to help. Our next season is launching in just a few months. So get us your questions now by emailing howto at npr.org or calling 1-800-424-2935. This message comes from the Kresge Foundation.

Established 100 years ago, the Kresge Foundation works to expand equity and opportunity in cities across America. A century of impact, a future of opportunity. More at kresge.org. And we're back and we've been talking about some of the upcoming deadlines that President Trump is facing, some external, some self-imposed. And the other thing in this July pileup is the tariff deadline. Danielle, you have been following this closely. They've been on pause, but that pause is supposed to expire on July 8th. And we've heard about negotiations of trade deals, but we haven't heard about a lot of deals being struck. So where do things stand?

We don't know where things stand because let me give our listeners just some basic grounding in what we're talking about here. Our listeners may remember at the beginning of April, Trump announced tariffs on most countries in the world, some of those tariffs very, very high. And then markets freaked out, the stock market freaked out, bond markets freaked out, and economists said this is not going to be good. Well, okay, then Trump said, all right, I'm pausing them. And by pause, what he meant was, I'm just going to put everybody's tariffs at 10%, 10% on most goods, and I'm going to pause those for 90 days.

And that brings us to July 8th. So at midnight on July 9th, those tariffs are supposed to snap back according to an executive order that Donald Trump has signed. But what you're getting at here is that, yes, there's that self-imposed deadline he set there, but he has said multiple times, more tariff deals are coming. Those have not come to fruition. So it is a big question mark. First of all, okay, where are those deals? Second of all, how hard and fast is that midnight July 9th deadline? And third of all, one more layer of uncertainty here is, you may recall, we did a podcast episode a few weeks ago about a ruling from the Court for International Trade, which said these tariffs that Trump imposed way back when in April are not legal.

Well, the Trump administration is appealing that decision and the tariffs are still on right now. But the question is, will these tariffs be found illegal? So there is so much weighing here. By the way, July 9th, that's not just the reciprocal tariffs. That is the deadline that Trump set for those 50% EU tariffs that he floated on Truth Social last month. He said, I'm going to set EU tariffs at 50% starting in June. Then he talked to the EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen and said, no, no, no, wait, okay, fine. We'll postpone those until July 9th. Well, that's coming.

Besides that, there is a deadline in August for China tariffs when he says those are going to go back up. So he has really set himself up a list of tariff deadlines to deal with. Can I just throw some cold water on those deadlines? Because not all deadlines are created equal. A deadline for like the US to default on its debt, that's a real deadline. Or a deadline when the government runs out of funding and shuts down, that's a real deadline.

But the deadlines that he puts on tariffs, he can put them on and he can take them away. I mean, it's just up to his whim and how he's feeling on a given day. So the deadline itself is something that he created and he can uncreate it. And it doesn't mean anything necessarily because his deadlines, at least in the trade talks,

come and go. Right. So some of these deadlines are real and they really, really matter, but other deadlines are real and they really, really matter, but other deadlines are just the way Donald Trump negotiates by changing his mind every other day. I want to spend a little bit of time on his mood because it definitely seems like his tone has shifted when he's talking about these things, whether it's Iran and Israel or his

Hill package. He does seem frustrated. Yeah. I mean, I think one measure of this is the density of social media posts on truth social, especially late at night, which he's had a lot of lately. He really is getting upset. First of all, if people dare to question how great his actions have been, as with, say, the intelligence assessment of to what degree his bombings in Iran have destroyed their nuclear capabilities. He and Pete Haggiseth today, defense secretary at that press conference,

got very mad, called out news media outlets by name because they reported on that intelligence assessment that said, no, you only set back Iran's nuclear capabilities by a few months. So he's frustrated with that. He also had a Truth Social post recently where he said something to the effect of no one goes home for vacation until we pass the one big, beautiful bill. He really wants that passed as well, his big signature economic policy. So yeah, he seems very frustrated about things. But then again, Trump goes on to tears all the time. How far is this from the baseline of frustration? I couldn't tell you. Gidley today. He worked in the first Trump administration. He's definitely very close to the second Trump administration and also close to the Speaker of the House. And I asked him about whether there was an analogous time to the first term where Trump had this much on his plate. And here's what he said. Every day, we always joke about how the highs are so high in a White House, but the lows are so low.

And every day, it's just a heart monitor in a hospital. It's like up and down, up and down, all day long. And I can't come up with a time that was as pressure filled in the previous administration as we're dealing with right now, although I'm sure there were plenty. He just says that the stakes are so high. You know, we talk about the taxes in the One Big Beautiful bill, but also there's funding for border enforcement, which is this very big important issue where, thus far, the Trump administration, although they've done a lot, they haven't yet gotten the numbers that they essentially promised their voters that they would get in terms of deportations and changes. So, you know, there's

just a lot at stake here. And you can't underestimate also the pressure that comes from this Iran-Israel issue, the tenuous nature of the ceasefire, though President Trump seems pretty confident it's gonna stick. Presidents often have a lot going on, but this is sort of a make or break moment that could define his presidency, arguably. But you know, what's interesting about make or break moments

with Donald Trump is we keep on thinking that we're at all these make or break moments, and sometimes they just don't affect him at all. I mean, he is the person who very famously said I could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn't lose any voters. And he's been indicted and he's been convicted and he's had one promise after another not be fulfilled and his approval ratings, they are historically low, but they pretty much stay in place. I totally agree. And this is a thing that I've been thinking about. When we say there's

political pressure on Donald Trump, pressure from whom or pressure from where and what are the stakes? I mean, if we think about tariffs, I mean, Mara mentioned earlier that the one big beautiful bill isn't that popular. Well, tariffs aren't either. And even if they are central to his economic policy, which they most certainly are, we've seen in consumer confidence numbers that voters are scared of them, are scared of the price hikes that would come with them. So if tariffs don't happen, then what? You know, then is that bad for Trump? Is that bad for his party? Or do people shrug it off and move on

and does he find a way to spin it? Cause the man is good at spinning things. Or if tariffs don't go on, the markets heave a sigh of relief and go up. And he takes credit for it. Yes, yes. He takes credit for not ruining the economy with his tariff. Part of Trump's playbook, of course,

is to declare victory no matter what happens. But there is one thing where he has been frustrated at his inability to make a deal, and that is the Ukraine-Russia war. And in his press conference today, he said that Vladimir Putin really has to end that war. He said that he met with Zelensky, who was very nice. That's a change from the last time he met with Zelensky in the Oval Office and berated him. He said also of Putin, he said, I consider him a person that's been misguided. And then he said, I thought it would be easier. So this is somebody who was always talking about his dealmaking prowess. He said again today, my whole life is deals. He wrote the book, The Art of the Deal, but this is an example where his self-proclaimed

deal-making skills just haven't worked. We'll leave it there for today. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtz-Levin. I also cover the White House. And I'm Mara Lyason, Senior National Political Correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.